


Songs in the Key of (221)B (2012)

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [22]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF!Kids, Gen, John used to be in a band, Kidfic, Music, Secrets, Sexual References, Songs, Strong Language, epic best friends, growing up Holmes, growing up Watson, shock blankets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-15 03:34:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 53,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of ficlets and drabbles set in the twenty seven years between the events of Collared and The Sweetest Day. Story titles generally come from song lyrics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I've Just Seen a Face

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock Holmes and Tad Anderson's new girlfriend, Charlotte, share a secret. One which they will never, ever speak of again.

The first time John and Sherlock meet Tad Anderson’s new girlfriend, Charlotte, Sherlock stares. John has to kick him in the ankle to make him stop.

Anderson’s starting to worry what Sherlock’s deducing about her, especially has he’s waited a while before bringing her to one of the Collared gigs. Sherlock has a tendency to make a shambles of his love life. The thing is, Tad is getting very serious about Charlotte, and he doesn’t want to find out in one of Sherlock’s trademark verbal demolitions that she’s a thief, a liar, already married, already having an affair, a brutaliser of small animals or just plain not in love with him. (That had been Jilly, his last attempt at a serious relationship, who it seemed had come to him on the rebound, and bounced right back to her former love once he’d sorted himself out. That had been humiliating. And depressing.)

But Sherlock doesn’t say anything, perhaps because his ankle hurts, perhaps because John Watson is giving him a look that would cauterise wounds.

Sherlock, for his part, can see that Charlotte is in fact quite innocuous. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, certainly, but perfectly within Anderson’s league. Clearly besotted (there was no accounting for taste, really) and on the whole fairly pleasant, as the-rest-of-the-world-are-idiots go.

But what actually stops him short is Charlotte’s strong resemblance to someone he knows, but can’t quite place. He’s about to ask some searching questions when John kicks him in the ankle again, reminding him that he promised to stop savaging Anderson’s dates.

Sherlock and John refer to the time Sherlock was pretending to be dead as his year Away. Privately, Sherlock calls it the Year in Hell. He survived it, but he came home changed, and not for the worst. He is still essentially himself, but he tries to remember that his friends don’t always appreciate the purity of his deductions. His insights are not meant to be hurtful – well, not usually – but they are what he sees. Slowly, he’s remembering to put a filter between his observations and his mouth. He fails often, and spectacularly, but does sometimes remember that you’re not supposed to shame or embarrass those you care about. Weird as it is, Tad Anderson is now within that sphere.

When he works out who Charlotte reminds him of, it’s not Tad’s feelings that make Sherlock press his lips together and swear never to say a word to anyone.

True fact. Tad Anderson practically swooned as a fanboy the year he discovered that Dr John Watson was _the_ John Watson, formerly of Gladstone’s Collar, a punk rock band that had burned bright then disappeared in the 90s. Anderson had been to all of their gigs, owned both their albums, and learned to play drums as a direct consequence of his teen music crush on the band. Twenty years later and it was no surprise that Tad hadn’t recognised John, especially out of context, until Sherlock had manoeuvred John and his guitar onto a stage on open mic night and Anderson had been there. Anderson’s whole approach to John had changed from that moment on.

The excitement and fanboyishness had burgeoned threefold when Tad had been commandeered as a drummer to join the Gladstone’s Collar revival for an undercover gig. It was a teasing, running joke that Tad had stars in his eyes for John, as his former music idol who had managed to get Tad a drumming gig playing a festival. Now Tad seemed to live his life with an undercurrent of delight at being part of Collared, which they did just for fun when they had the time.

True facts. Tad Anderson is resolutely heterosexual. He also resolutely has a music boner for John Watson.

And Tad Anderson’s new, very serious girlfriend, notes Sherlock Holmes just as the penny is dropping, is short. She has a round face, short blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Her expression is often thoughtful but when she smiles, it’s a dazzling smile that transforms her face. Her nose is a little pointed. She has a very determined way of walking.

She is, in fact, a passing facsimile for John Watson, if John had been female.

All through the gig and then packing up and then drinks afterwards, Sherlock waits for someone else to notice. To comment. To whisper to him or to John: ‘hang on, doesn’t Charlotte look a bit like our lead singer?’. But nobody says a word.

Not even John.

Sherlock thinks it astonishing that no-one else can see the resemblance. And it’s not as though they’ve seen it and are holding their tongues, because he’s been looking for the giveaway signs that someone _has_ seen what he sees, and there aren’t any. Even John’s face is completely innocent of comprehension, and while that’s not uncommon, even for John, it seems wilfully ignorant this time.

Maybe John is not seeing it out of some unconscious self defence reflex. Because Sherlock is certainly finding it disconcerting that Tad has found a female John lookalike to shag.

So for a wonder, for a certified wonder of the world, Sherlock actually keeps his mouth shut. He keeps it shut tight and he does not point out that if John wore a dress and slapped on some make-up, he could pass for Charlotte in low light.

He does this because he does not want John to feel uncomfortable, and because Collared needs its drummer, and because – this last one Sherlock is reluctant to admit, even to himself – because Tad, when not casting Sherlock nervous glances, actually looks happy; and Charlotte actually looks happy when she looks at Tad; and Sherlock does not know what purpose it will serve to make everyone unhappy just so he can say ‘Tad Anderson, your homoerotic music boner for John is showing’. So he doesn’t say it.

All the same, Sherlock is unspeakably relieved when, the next time he sees Charlotte, she has grown her hair longer and dyed it red. Their gazes meet briefly. Long enough for Sherlock to realise that the only other person who noticed the resemblance was the woman herself. She gives him a steely, challenging look, so he raises his eyebrows in a question, as though he has no idea what her eye-daggers mean. She nods once, sharply, satisfied.

Sherlock and Charlotte never became close, but they do share a secret, and that turns out to be enough to be friends, of a sort, for the rest of their lives.

 

 


	2. Shock Treatment: My Favourite Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherrinford Holmes has been known to think himself into vomiting. When he distresses himself thus while visiting his biological father, Sherlock uses shock blanket therapy to deal with it.

Sherrinford Holmes – called Ford by everyone but his Daddy – is an extremely bright child, like both of his fathers. He has also inherited many of his biological father’s traits, from his gangly frame to the way his brain is never still. It makes both Sherlock and Mycroft feel for him, because they both remember what it was like for Sherlock growing up. They remember how hard it can be.

Sherrinford’s mother, Sally Donovan, is learning much more than she bargained for when she decided to have a child with Mycroft. She would do anything, anything, anything to protect her boy from his own mind, and she can’t, so she just loves him as hard as she can. She hates that she has to rely on his fathers to know what to do, particularly as she fears that they don’t really know _at all_ what to do. All they have to go on is their own experience and, well, she loves Mycroft Holmes, and she has learned to like Sherlock Holmes after a fashion, but let’s be honest. Look at how they turned out. Messed up. That is how.

But they muddle through, Sherrinford’s three parents. They find ways to make Ford’s childhood better than theirs was.

Sometimes Ford’s brain is so full it’s like a hurricane in there. Thoughts and feelings swirl and he feels like he is losing control and he can’t keep all the pieces together, and he doesn’t always know what he feels and how he feels about the individual and collective thoughts and ideas in his head. He’s only six. It’s confusing. This confusion manifests itself as stomach aches. Sherrinford has been known to think himself into vomiting.

This is what he does the afternoon he spends with Sherlock, one of his regular visits with his biological father.  John is at the clinic, locuming between cases to keep his hand in, as he says. Violet is off with Mary amd Nirupa, in Ecuador. This leaves Sherlock alone with Ford for the afternoon. Sherlock’s fine with this. He used to think children were dull, but he finds himself endlessly fascinated with Violet and Ford.

He doesn't mind even when Ford thinks himself into a distressed frenzy and ends up throwing up his lunch, a cup of milk and the bile made from the maelstrom of his thoughts, all over his clothes. The boy feels overwhelmed, ashamed, sticky and helpless and is trying not to cry. His suppressed sobs are wracking his thin body and threatening to make him sicker still.

Sherlock knows what it’s like. He remembers it, even though he wishes he didn’t. But for the first time in his life, remembering what it was to be six and swamped with thoughts and emotions and feeling dirty and disgusted by his own body, for the first time he might be able to do something useful with the knowledge.

Gently, with soothing words – _it’ all right, Ford. They’re just clothes. We can wash them. Shhh_ – he unclothes the child. He strips down to boxers himself, lifts Ford in his arms and together they stand under the shower.

Ford clings to him, and after a while he gives up the teeth-clenched, choked whimpers and lets himself just cry, water running over his skin, his father’s hands too, running in gentle sweeps from his scalp down his back, Sherlock’s voice a deep, soothing murmur that blends with the sound of falling water.

When Ford’s crying has subsided, Sherlock sets him on his feet, sits in the tub and guides Ford to sit with him, so Sherlock can finish washing the sick and snot away. (Sherlock has at times been coated with filth from London’s sewers. His son’s bodily fluids bother him not at all.) He talks the whole time, softly, rhymes and poems and lyrics to songs that he knows Ford likes. _Beware the Jabberwock._ _Cabbages and Kings._ _Shall I compare thee?  This ghost’s alive and breathing. I was at aphelion._ Anything that will help Ford be outside his own head for a little while.

When both Ford and Sherlock are clean to Sherlock’s satisfaction, Sherlock lifts Ford out of the tub and onto the floor, steps out, and wraps Ford in a huge towel. He dries them both off, carries Ford to the bedroom where Sherlock changes into pyjamas and finds a T-shirt to slip over Ford’s head. Then Sherlock goes to the cupboard to fetch one of several bright orange blankets that he and John have accumulated over the years.

He wraps Ford in the blanket and sits beside him on the bed. Ford has stopped crying, but his face is solemn and sad. He is sitting upright, no longer leaning into Sherlock. Sherlock knows what that’s like as well, not wanting to be touched afterwards, feeling so raw and like all your nerve endings are exposed. He knows Ford’s mind is cranking up again.

“This is called a shock blanket,” Sherlock tells him, tugging the ends a little closer around Ford’s body, “They give these to people who are feeling upset. Often, the orange blankets help people to feel better. Do you know why?”

Ford takes a shallow breath. It sounds high and sharp, but he likes a puzzle. The boy focuses, trying to think why an orange blanket would make someone feel better. Is it because of the colour? Orange is a good colour. He likes orange.

“Orange is a happy colour,” says Ford slowly, “So it makes people feel happier.”

“Why is orange a happy colour?”

“Because it’s the colour of oranges. And the fire in the fireplace in our sitting room when Daddy make hot chocolate. It’s the colour of my goldfish, Fermat. Mummy’s prettiest dress is orange and Daddy’s prettiest tiepin is amber, which is orange. Lava is orange and I like volcanoes. Mars is a bit orange in the sky, that’s been in the news, people are living on another planet, I like that too, and the life jackets on the ferry across the Thames were orange when Daddy and Mummy and I went on a ride last weekend. There was a Golden Poison Frog in the zoo, it was orange, it was really _interesting_.”

Sherlock strokes Ford’s cheek. The words are spilling out, but it’s not babble. Ford’s speaking more slowly, in fact. Getting the jumble in his head to focus, getting it in order. “Those are all good,” says Sherlock.

“Is orange your favourite colour, too?” asks Ford carefully.

“Some bees are orange and black,” says Sherlock, “I quite like that. I don’t really have a favourite colour, though.”

 

Ford sits very quietly for a moment. “Orange isn’t everyone’s favourite colour,” he says after a moment, “Violet likes red and Chris likes purple. So it can’t just be the colour that makes people feel better. “

“That’s right,” says Sherlock, voice filled with approval, “So what else could it be?”

Ford looks at the blanket, and looks up into Sherlock’s face.

“It’s because people who love you give you blankets to make you feel warm and safe,” says Ford, “So it doesn't matter what colour it is. When someone you love gives you a happy coloured blanket, you feel better.”

“Excellent. Good boy.” Sherlock drops a kiss on Ford’s head, and with a little sigh Ford burrows into Sherlock’s side, the rigidity of anxiety and brainstorms fallen away.

Hours later, when Mycroft comes to collect his son (with a change of clothes, having received Sherlock’s text message) he finds Ford running around 221B in a long, tatty t-shirt pretending to be an explorer on Mars. Sherlock is sitting on the sofa, researching types of pipes used to restore plumbing in 18th century historic homes. He is wearing pyjama bottoms and is inexpertly wrapped in an orange blanket.

Ford flings himself at his father and is hugged tightly in return. While Ford changes into his fresh clothes, Mycroft stands there, looking at Sherlock, looking at Sherrinford, thinking how alike they are. How Sherrinford may be his second chance,  to get it right this time. Mycroft knows that Sherlock knows what he is thinking. They smile tightly at each other, and then the expressions soften.

“Did you have a good afternoon?” asks Mycroft.

“Very good, yes,” says Sherlock, because as far as he’s concerned, it was.  At least, it turned out that way, and that’s what counts.

“Next  Friday then?”

“Of course.”

Once changed, Ford throws himself at Sherlock. Sherlock shifts the computer out of the way just in time, and catches the boy in his arms. Ford presses his forehead to Sherlock’s. He tugs the awkwardly draped blanket closer around Sherlock’s chest, trying to tidy up his earlier efforts. Sherlock places his hand over Ford’s small fists.

“All warm and safe?” the boy asks.

“I am, thank you,” replies Sherlock sincerely.                                                                           

Ford stands on the sofa so that he can kiss the top of Sherlock’s head. “Goodbye, Sherlock.”

“Goodbye, Ford.”

 

Then Ford turns and holds his hands up to his father, and Mycroft lifts him up. Sherlock can hear them talking all the way down the stairs and into the street.

“Can I have some bees, Daddy?”

“Maybe when you’re older,” says Mycroft.

“Can I have a Golden Poison Frog, then? They’re orange. I like orange.”

“I could get you another goldfish,” Mycroft offers.

“Yes please,” says Ford, “Can I call him Lava?”

 


	3. The First Time (Ever I Saw Your Face)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John Watson almost never cries. But the day his daughter is born, he does.  
> Sherlock Holmes isn't very interested in babies. Until he meets Violet for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This story contains some very fruity language. Women in labour mustn't be expected to mind the proprieties.

Sherlock is in the waiting room, waiting for John. He had considered not being here. What’s the point? He was working on a case, had things to do, but somehow he finished with it in record time. He didn’t savour the resolution, for a change, filled as he was with a peculiar sense of urgency – to run off to the hospital so that he could _wait._ Ridiculous.

When he gets there, Nirupa D’Souza is coming out of the maternity ward, seeking coffee and a snack and a respite from what she refers to as Mary ‘getting in touch with her inner demon from the ninth circle of hell’.

When Sherlock gets to the waiting area outside Mary’s room, he understands what Nirupa means. Every time the door opens, letting staff in or out, he can hear Mary – vibrant, vivacious, good-humoured Mary – screaming sentences like _This is your fault you motherfucking cock-bollocksing fuck-buggery shitbag. Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrghhh!_ in a surprisingly guttural howl.

John emerges, rapidly and backwards, hands held up placatingly, after that last mouthful of abuse, ducking just in time to avoid being beaned by a small clock radio. He hovers at the door, glances over to see Sherlock and his whole body sags in relief.

“You made it.”

“Obviously.”

“Mary’s a bit…” John glances into the room, “Tired.”

“Of course I’m tired you _fucking arsehole_!” This is followed by a sort of shrieking whine, and John’s expression morphs from a wince to concern to an inexplicable tenderness. The next thing Sherlock hears is Mary groaning: “Sorry, John, sorry, sorry, hon, I’m sorry…”

“You’re doing well, baby, really well,” says John gently, moving back into the room. “Really well.” The door closes behind him and sounds are muffled for a short while. After a few minutes, John emerges again.

“Just taking a break,” he says to Sherlock, “The midwife says I should get something to drink. Or. Something.”

Sherlock has seen John Watson fight a giant assassin. He has seen him run across rooftops, seen him wrapped in Semtex, seen him in the throes of nightmare and seen him throwing himself towards a stampeding cow. Sherlock Holmes has never, ever seen John Watson look this uncertain. Not knowing what else to do, he pats John’s shoulder, squeezes it. “She’ll be fine.”

“Of course. I know that.”

“How long before…”

“Who knows? Soon, we hope. She’s exhausted.”

“Her vocabulary is quite inventive for someone so exhausted.”

John huffs a laugh. “I think she got most of that from me over the last few years. I’m going to have to learn to curb that mouth of mine in front of our kid.”

And then John’s expression goes a bit strange and far off. He grins. Sherlock pats his shoulder again.

John takes his break and returns with Nirupa. Nirupa is left in the waiting room with Sherlock, apparently annoyed at this division of company. She thinks she should be in with Mary. Sherlock thinks John should be out here with him. They both realise that they are thoroughly unreasonable.

“So,” says Nirupa after a while, “Interesting case today?”

Sherlock kills time by telling her all about the little problem of the murdered shop girl from the Harrods perfume counter and the link with the exotic animal smuggling ring, and how the two crimes were connected by a silver crucifix, a black biro and a Mexican fighting fish.

Nirupa is a gratifying audience, making intelligent comment and asking insightful questions. When they’re done, he asks about her recent work with an indigenous community in the Andes, and she talks for a while about rituals of birth, death and marriage and the ceremony they held when Mary realised she was pregnant while at the bridge-building project. Sherlock may not have believed in the protective magic the ritual was supposed to engender, but he found the details fascinating.

They talk for a few hours, and they are both bored, but every time Sherlock thinks he’ll just go home and shoot a few holes in the wall to pass the time, he discovers he has failed to get up, to leave, to do anything but wait, staring at the door. He and Nirupa fall silent eventually, and find they like the silence better than their conversation. It’s quite companionable, really, or would be if they weren’t both so tense.

But finally, after long hours both stressful and tedious, after hearing muffled cries and moans behind the door (and a deeper voice offering loving, reassuring encouragement despite the alternating strings of invective and apology) – after all of that comes the sharp, exultant wail of a baby’s cry.

Nirupa and Sherlock both sit bolt upright in their uncomfortable chairs and stare at the door, like a pair of pointer dogs. They are both practically quivering, but neither moves.

At last the door opens and John comes out with a bundle in his arms and a look on his face like he has been bludgeoned by angels.

His battered-by-bliss expression lifts from the infant momentarily, reluctant to light upon anything else. “She’s a girl. We have a little girl.” He looks back down at her. “Violet Morstan Watson.”

He looks up again, at Nirupa. “Mary’s asked for you.”

Nirupa practically flies into Mary’s room, though she hovers very briefly beside John, gazing down at the baby like she is made of rainbows. Then she hears Mary say “Rupe?” and she is off. There will be time to adore the Golden Child later.

John steps into the waiting room, still gazing raptly at his daughter.

“Sherlock,” he whispers, not looking up, voice filled with wonder.

“Congratulations, John.” Sherlock’s voice is normal – even, cool, pleasant. He is remembering the things one is supposed to say in these circumstances. He cannot take his eyes off John’s face.

John drags his eyes up to meet Sherlock’s. His blue eyes are wide and round and overwhelmed. His eyes are swimming and flooding and tears are falling down his face and around his huge smile, a cascade of joy.

And Sherlock knows that, as well as he knows John, as familiar as he is with the myriad of expressions, subtle and broad, that John’s wonderful face has shown him over the years, he has never seen _this_ face before. Not even when Sherlock returned from the Year in Hell, though it’s the closest he can imagine.

He thinks this is the first time he has ever seen John cry (apart from that once, from grief) and the wonder is that it doesn’t make him look weak, not at all. John looks strong. He looks like he could conquer worlds.

“Sherlock,” says John again, as though he doesn’t know any other words at all.

Sherlock swallows, wondering at the emotion filling his throat. He knows it’s not for the baby, not really. Babies are babies. Soft, formless, blobby, noisy, leaky. Quite uniform and very dull. So this feeling is all for John, and that look on John’s face.

As though reading Sherlock’s uncharitable thoughts about the interestingness of babies, the infant Violet wriggles in John’s arms, opens her little pink mouth and squawks. _Aaaah_ and _uckuckuck_ and then she builds up a head of steam quite out of proportion to the size of her little lungs and she wails.

“She has your temper,” observes Sherlock, voicing the first thought he has.

It makes John laugh. It makes him giggle. “Oh god, I hope not.” He giggles some more, sniffing in between breathless bouts, tears still flowing freely down his face and dripping wantonly onto the soft blanket wrapped around his still crying daughter.

Suddenly, Sherlock feels overwhelmingly grateful – to this child, to Mary – for giving this new feeling, this new face, the face of a father, to John.

“She’s still crying,” says John, a bit helplessly, though he’s still giggling a bit, and sniffing, and it’s an inane comment, but Sherlock will forgive it because John is obviously blissed out and not at his cognitive best. Instead, Sherlock looks at Violet – properly looks at her this time.

Sherlock suddenly sees… everything. The colour of her new skin, and the shape of her ears, and her chin, and her forehead, and her tiny hands, and the nub of a nose that is yet to find its shape, and those huge eyes, scrunched up. Sherlock sees patterns and inheritance, and he sees Mary in that tiny face, and he sees John in it, John in her earlobes, and Mary  in that chin but John in that forehead, and John in that small, raging voice, and John and John and John…

“She has your DNA,” says Sherlock, unaware of the wonder in his voice, though he is aware of the pointlessness of the comment, because, well, of course she does, but it seemed a point worth making when he opened his mouth to repeat his revelation.

John just grins. Giggles. He is rocking Violet gently, trying to calm her, but he can’t seem to stop laughing.

“Yes, she has, Sherlock. Mine and Mary’s.” Like he has just had an epiphany as well.

“It is excellent DNA, John,” says Sherlock warmly, approvingly.

John readily agrees that it is.

Violet Morstan Watson yells some more, wriggles, waves her tiny fist, and Sherlock slides a finger over the skin of her knuckles. Babies, he decides, may not be quite so boring after all. Certainly, this one will be an exception. He does wish she’s stop yelling though. It’s making her face red. She doesn’t look comfortable. It is important that John’s-daughter-Violet be comfortable.

Sherlock leans over the baby, and he will never be able to identify what caused this impulse, but he purses his lips and he blows a gentle raspberry into Violet’s face. Violet’s cry stutters to a halt. Sherlock inhales and blows another warm, noisy breath at her. Violet ceases to cry altogether. Instead, she waves her hand until it connects with Sherlock’s mouth, and she grips his lower lip in her fierce baby fist. It makes him want to laugh, but that would dislodge her, so he keeps very, very still.

 _I will love you because you are part of John,_ he finds himself thinking. Later he will think, _how odd, that the transmission of DNA can transmit emotion as well_. But there he has it. He loves John. Violet is part of John. He loves Violet. The logic is irrefutable.

For the first time in his life, Sherlock wonders if this is what happened to Mycroft, seven years old when his baby brother was brought home. Did that mix of familial DNA induce a rush of this ferocious, aching tenderness? No matter how Mycroft may have bollocksed it up over the years with his need for control, was this the feeling at the heart of it?

“Sherlock?”

Violet lets go of Sherlock’s lip, and she’s making gurgling noises now. Sherlock drags his gaze up to meet John’s.

“Sherlock, did you just cow whisper my daughter?”

Sherlock blinks. “Yes.”

“Seems to work,” says John, “I think you’re going to have to teach it to me if we’re going to survive the first few years.”

Sherlock beams at him.  John grins back.

“I’d better go back to Mary. You should come in to say hello.”

“In a moment,” says Sherlock, “I need to make a note.”

John doesn’t ask. He leans down to kiss Violet’s soft head and carries her back to her mother and the person he already knows will be Violet’s other mother.

Sherlock sinks into a chair for a moment, then scrabbles for his notebook and a pen.

Already, his mind is throwing together notes and phrases, and he dashes down the sense of them in musical notation. A violin sonata for Violet.

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Having My Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft's body has failed him. He needs to ask a favour from his brother. Is it too much to ask?

Violet Morstan Watson’s birth, and Sherlock Holmes’s ongoing fascination with her daily development (cognitive, motor, emotional; when she looks more like John, when like Mary; when uniquely herself) didn’t give Sherlock the idea of becoming a parent. As devoted as he unexpectedly found himself to the child, he had no illusions about himself. Fatherhood was not in his life plan, not even as a provisional footnote, and he was perfectly happy with that.

However, Violet’s presence in his life in the past month, and the effect it clearly had on John, and on his recollections of his own childhood, made him more amenable to the unexpected proposal when Mycroft approached him.

Mycroft was embarrassed, reluctant and determined. The embarrassment was the hook of course. He knew that Sherlock couldn’t resist listening to a proposal with that at the back of it.

Mycroft met Sherlock at Baker Street while John was out. He had recovered from his injuries, inflicted on the day that Sally Donovan had nearly died: the day she had kept his own relatively minor injuries from becoming fatal ones. She had almost fully recovered, too, thanks to the best care that Mycroft’s influence could bend to her needs.

The intervening months for the two of them had been curiously intense. Curiously rapid. Curiously divine. The speed at which their relationship had moved was almost indecent, except that Mycroft kept finding it wasn’t moving swiftly enough for him. He had a sudden sense of time running out, and that was why, despite the embarrassment, he was here. Mycroft tried not to feel shame about it. After all, it was simply something his body had done to him, or rather, couldn’t do for him. It was not of his volition, not his fault.

Still. Best to say it, get it out, get it done, and find out where Sherlock stood on the matter.

“It turns out,” said Mycroft at Baker Street, over tea and shortbread, “That I am infertile.”

He and Sherlock looked at each other for a moment, each making a score of observations in that second. Observations coupled with a lifetime of intimate data; and therefore, swift analysis followed.

“I imagine,” replied Sherlock after a moment, “That this is a problem when you have decided to become a parent.”

“It… is. Yes. I thought…”

“A donor?”

“Yes.”

“A Holmes.”

“Naturally.”

“Does she mind?”

“It was her suggestion.”

“That must have made for interesting pillow talk.”

“She wants me – us – to have this. She wants it too. She loves me.”

Sherlock could detect the unexpected tone of wonder behind the tone of smugness that Mycroft had intended to convey.

“Yes. I see that. Especially if she is willing to have _me_ as a surrogate.”

“I will be the child’s father, of course. Sally and I will raise him or her.”

“Of course.”

“Though you will have every access, should you wish it. I do not intend to build walls or… keep secrets.”

“That would be a change.”

“Yes. Yes it would. I thought… perhaps it would be a refreshing way to begin.”

“So much for ‘caring is not an advantage’.”

“It isn’t.”

“Caring saved your life. Sally loving you saved your life.”

“Caring about me nearly killed her. It wasn’t an advantage for her,” insisted Mycroft.

“Given this new development, I suspect she would not agree with you.”

Mycroft frowned slightly, thoughtfully, but the frown had a way of tilting at the corners, trying to be a smile instead. He had to school it very sternly. “Sally says that caring is a great motivator.”

Sherlock, who learned that hard lesson some years ago now and would not unlearn it for the world, nodded.

“It is,” continued Mycroft, “The reward. She says.”

The two men sat in silence for a while. Mycroft was waiting, apprehensively, though he wouldn’t let it show, because for the first time in a long time, he could not tell what Sherlock was thinking.

Sherlock was thinking of John’s face when he held Violet in his arms for the first time. Sherlock was thinking of how he himself fell incomprehensibly in love with that baby in what amounted to three breaths, because she was John’s.

He was remembering other things, too.

He remembered his brother’s voice joining John’s and Mrs Hudson’s at the other end of the phone during his Year in Hell. The catch he sometimes heard in his stoic sibling’s throat as he spoke about their old dog, Plutarch; about grandmere; about the weather, even. Mycroft there, part of his anchor, part of the home Sherlock was trying so desperately to return to. His reward.

He remembered how Mycroft had swooped down on him, delaying Sherlock’s return to Baker Street, as though afraid that once Sherlock was back in John’s orbit, there would be no room and no time for Mycroft. Sherlock had been furious at the time. Now Sherlock simply wondered how things might have been different if Mycroft had been less obsessive. Less afraid.

There was that other epiphany, too, that came to Sherlock’s mind: the way he’d thought of Mycroft as he had been instantly and wholly consumed with love for John’s infant daughter. That image of Mycroft as a boy, meeting his own little brother for the first time, perhaps overwhelmed by tenderness at this extension of his family and himself.

Sherlock was thinking that Mycroft loved him, even though his expression of that love was frequently ham-fisted, manipulative and controlling.

And he was thinking that he loved his brother, even though his own expression of it was smothered under defiance, contrariness and frequent bouts of rage.

And he was thinking that, for all that he had spent his life trying to claw out from under Mycroft’s oppressive, controlling love, that he wanted to give this to Mycroft; to give him afresh this feeling of unconditional love that was so purifying and so terrifying.

And he was thinking that his brother had nearly died. And that his brother was asking him for this – this intensely private, personal thing, this too-much-to-ask favour – and that this fact was astonishing on so many levels that new levels had to be created just to accommodate the astonishingness of it. And that his old enemy, Sally Donovan, had saved Mycroft, and _loved_ Mycroft, and wasn’t that a turn up for the books? Didn’t that require a few more new levels for the astonishing to live in?

Sherlock was thinking that maybe it was time for all three of them to grow the fuck up.

“Fine,” he said at last. “Let me know when to go to the clinic. But not next Wednesday. I have places to be next Wednesday.”

Mycroft exhaled slowly. Nodded. Put his tea aside and made to rise.

“Stay a little,” said Sherlock, the first time Baker Street had ever witnessed such an invitation between these two brothers, “Finish your tea. Have another biscuit. Talk.”

Mycroft examined Sherlock’s expression for some kind of trick, but in the end he relaxed, finished his tea, ate a biscuit. They talked about traditional Holmes family names, and together chose four options that might be acceptable to the mother of the child.

And that was that.


	5. Messin' with the Danger Zone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock has agreed to be a sperm donor so that Mycroft and Sally can become parents. The next bit should be easy. Apparently, though, it's not, and Sherlock requires a specific type of stimulation.
> 
> (Note that this story is more sexually explicit than the usual Guitar Man fic, involving as it does masturbation. For science.)

Sherlock Holmes sighed, irritated. Bored. Annoyed. He hated not being good at things. And this was such a fundamental thing. Not to mention the fact that it was for a good cause: not to carry on the Holmes family name, which Sherlock supposed might be a cause good enough for this hideous debacle, but for Mycroft. Because Mycroft wanted a child, and was infertile.

When Sherlock agreed to become a sperm donor for Mycroft and Sally, he had known that he would have to masturbate. Of course he did. For sperm to be available, it would have to be extracted, and the easiest and most efficient way to extract it was by the traditional method. To wit: one penis, one hand, one set of erotic thoughts, and off you go.

It wasn’t difficult. An idiot could do it. Idiots, in fact, did it every day of the year. Some of them multiple times a day. Sherlock knew for a fact that his friend and colleague and flatmate and brother-in-all-but-blood John Watson took care of his own physical needs on a fairly regular basis when Mary Morstan was not in town. Which was most of the time. All quite mundane, but perfectly natural, perfectly normal, if you liked that sort of thing.

And of course, Sherlock had masturbated before. As a teenager. At university. From time to time as an adult, when he woke up at attention for whatever tedious biological reasons existed for such a thing. He had mostly curbed that particular physical need, just as he had curbed hunger and the need for sleep. His body’s sexual needs were dull, a distraction from the work and the bright, sharp weapon that was his mind, and, frankly, pointless.

All of which left Sherlock in a cubicle at the fertility clinic with a container in one hand, a flaccid penis in the other and a strong (and growing) sense of aggravation. Seriously, he would have rathered some doctor just had at him with a suitable syringe. But apparently the apparatus, and therefore the specialist, did not exist.

Sherlock was disgruntled that science had let him down.

The main problem was that to achieve results – that is, to ejaculate – he would have to get aroused. And there wasn’t much that aroused Sherlock, to tell the awkward truth. He got quite excited by crime scenes, but not aroused by them, in the way that some people thought.

Sherlock grit his teeth. He would not be defeated by… by wanking, or whatever euphemism people chose to call the act. He was a genius. He could… (he reached down and took a good hold of himself, firm but not too firm)…

…he could beat the bishop (a few pumps of the lube, supplied in a fresh unopened container made the action a little smoother) …

…badger the witness (and there you go, the simple action of friction of skin on sensitive skin, a purely biological response, nothing to it)…

…whip the stiff. (Aaaaand, there it went again, wilting at the word association. Ridiculous. Why was mental imagery such an essential component of this whole messy exercise? Seriously. The people who thought he found his work sexually stimulating would be laughing on the other side of their faces if they could see him now.)

Right. Fine. Mental stimulation of some sort would be required along with the physical stimulation.

Perhaps, Sherlock considered, he should visualise the child’s mother-to-be, whom the medical professionals would impregnate with his sperm in order that brother Mycroft could fulfil his sudden and startling desire to have offspring somewhat related to his own DNA. Right. Good.

Two minutes in, and only mental images of Sally Donovan sneering at him, or scowling at him, or rolling her eyes at him appeared. They were not helpful. Sherlock was quite certain that, in fact, his penis and scrotum had shrunk 15 percent since he started.

Oh. What was he thinking? Obviously, he wasn’t. Clearly he should be thinking of The Woman. With her cheekbones and that mind and that grace and that cleverness and _that betrayal and that attempt to play him like he was a damned violin_ and he may have saved her life but he did not trust her or like her or want her, she had nearly destroyed him and he had learned that lesson well and taken it to heart.

And now he was angry and bitter and a long, long way from aroused.

Clearly that was no good either. Fine. All right then. Probably he should think of someone he liked, and who liked him. Which left… DI Lestrade. No. Mrs Hudson. **_Oh God, no_**. John.

John.

They had a very close, very warm personal relationship. They more than liked each other. Their dedication to one another was practically legendary. They were mistaken for a couple all the time. The fact that, on a day to day basis, Sherlock was not actually physically attracted to John’s body was neither here nor there. For the purposes of this exercise, Sherlock just needed to imagine someone who didn’t outright repel him, surely.

Sherlock took hold of himself and tried again. He lubed up, took a good steady grip, and imagined John. His bare chest (with that terrible but interesting scar) and his blunt, efficient hands (so steady with a gun in them, and Sherlock admired competence, he really did) and John’s sassy dancing with a guitar in his hands when they played music together, the kind of movement that had led Sally Donovan to once referring to John as Doctor Sex, which was utterly hilarious. Seriously funny. No. Wait. Funny was not what he was going for here. So. Yes. All right. John, playing music. A good image that. Not arousing yet, but a familiar image that filled him with affection. Right. So.

Sherlock imagined John’s mouth. Imagined John’s eyes. Imagined John’s eyebrows arching up in that particularly sardonic way of his, as if to say ‘what the hell are you up to now?’ and his mouth pursed in that disapproving way he had when he knew perfectly well what Sherlock was up to and accurately surmised that it was leading to trouble but not of the fun kind. He imagined John, arms crossed, foot tapping impatiently, and saying, _yes, all well and good, but Sherlock, **Sherlock** , it’s like shagging your own brother_.

And then Sherlock got a mental image of Mycroft and his genitalia shrivelled another 10 percent.

With a sigh, Sherlock let his abused member go for a moment and tried to think of some other approach. Perhaps it would be best not to use someone he knew personally for visual stimulation.  It felt awkward, even in his own head, and he actually didn’t even secretly fancy anyone he knew. His love for his few friends did not tend to stray into the areas of _eros_ at all.

What Sherlock found stimulating, he decided, was intellect. His few liaisons at university had been with brilliant people: one fellow student; two lecturers. Nothing that lasted very long. He got bored very quickly, and already by then he was learning to control his body’s urges. But yes, he had enjoyed people who were both attractive and had fierce intelligence. Gender was neither here nor there.

Wiping his hand on a towel to remove most of the lube, Sherlock fished out his smartphone and tapped in a search term.

Sexiest Nobel Prize winners.  Sherlock tapped on the first link and expanded the photographs.

Oh, that was better. Marie Curie was quite attractive. That wasn’t a bad photo, either. Madame Curie looked stern and alert, and she had very good cheekbones. Jacobus Henricus van‘t Hoff wasn’t too bad either. A Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and in the photo he already had a coiffeur of obvious bed hair, which should surely help with the mental imagery. The enormous moustache on Christiaan Eijkman, Nobel Laureate for Physiology, was a bit off-putting, though. Sherlock tried to imagine being kissed by someone wearing that awful facial explosion of hair, and even in his imagination he found it ticklish and irritating. Right.  Van’t Hoff it would be, then.

All set then, with one attractive and brilliant woman and one attractive and brilliant man, because Sherlock cared much less about the functional body parts than about the brain attached.

Relubed, Sherlock reached down for himself again. Stroked himself. He thought of Marie Curie’s face in the lab, lighting up with intelligence and excitement as her elegant hands lifted a retort. And there was Jacobus (and in Sherlock’s head they would certainly be on a first name basis for this), with his bed hair and knowledge of osmotic pressure and that very stern gaze and full lower lip.

Sherlock imagined Marie Curie saying ‘Sherlock’ in her lovely Polish accent, and Jacobus saying ‘Sherlock’ in his Dutch accent, and decided that only Marie would talk for the rest of this fantasy. She whispered clever things about chemistry, and Jacobus murmured agreement just below hearing level, simply  a pleasant tenor counterpoint, and the two of them, in Sherlock’s mind, laid hands over his now satisfactorily erect penis and, well, yes, perhaps Jacobus could fondle his arse a bit, that was nice, and Marie Curie fondled his testicles, also very nice, and Jacobus whispered the laws of chemistry against his spine and Marie whispered formulas in mathematics and physics against his throat in Polish and in French and oh, yes, oh, yes, yes and…

… catch that in the container, yes, lid on, good and tight and…

Done.

Excellent.

That evening, Sherlock wrote a blog entry on the achievements in chemistry made by two Nobel Laureates who seemed to have little else in common.  Sherlock, in a rare flash of whimsy, thought it was the least he could do to say thank you to them for helping to make Mycroft a father.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out Marie and Jacobus [ here ](http://www.ibeatyou.com/blog/2009/10/09/sexiest-nobel-prize-winners/)
> 
> The title comes from a line in She Bop by Cyndi Lauper.


	6. Blood Sugar Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Mycroft Holmes recruited Sally Donovan to work for him during Collared's charity concert at Chingford Plains, they both hoped to redeem themselves. They had no idea what salvation might be found in each other.
> 
> Note: this story contains strong sexual references.

At the start, it was a professional courtesy, but not much more than that, to meet each week. No point in recruiting someone for their potential and then failing to nurture said potential. Mycroft Holmes knew there was a lot for him to draw on in Sally Donovan, to develop, to shape and nurture, with their shared failings motivating them. He knew what she needed, and knew he could give that to her, what with the way the two of them had misunderstood and misjudged and made mistakes and nearly destroyed the people that they cared about.

For her part, Sally Donovan knew she was working for someone, not sly, really, but someone who slid away from her comprehension when she tried to look at him squarely. Mycroft Holmes could be trusted, within certain parameters, and he gave her scope, also within certain parameters. Mycroft was clipped, guarded, often evasive in the way he spoke, but then he would give her guidance, offer suggestions, give her very specific objects to achieve, then give her flexibility in achieving them.  He sent her to specialists to improve her skills – marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, explosives, poisons, knife fighting, lock-picking. All necessary weapons in the fight against the cancer of Moriarty’s fragmented empire as it tried to regain footholds in the United Kingdom.

Sherlock had done his share, in a year of horror and loss that Sally was only just beginning to comprehend. The glimpses of it made her wonder at how Sherlock had survived it, returned to John and his former life. But that was the trick, wasn’t it? He hadn’t come back the same. He’d been broken somehow; yet coming home had made him whole again – but new. Sally only had to watch Sherlock play his violin with John, with that ridiculous-glorious band of theirs, to see that Sherlock Holmes was a remade man.

That day at Chingford Plains, when Mycroft Holmes had offered her this chance at redemption, she’d been remade as well. Layers of old armour were stripped and she’d found herself willingly stepping over that line, anti-Holmes to pro-Holmes. She stepped into place beside the older brother, gratefully, and the way she viewed the world had shifted. Sally was still herself, but new facets of who she was seemed to have been polished to a shine in those few hours.

So in those first few weeks in Mycroft Holmes’s employ, Sally trained hard and met with him to report on progress, to learn more about the men and women she was training to defeat. This man who was not sly but smoky, shifting.

No-one was more surprised than Sally to find that Mycroft’s obvious slipperiness somehow did not work on her. Not after the first few meetings, at any rate. She looked at him squarely after all, and saw something other than the smoke.

A typical briefing in the early days would be the introduction of the target, some suggestions, thick files of photographs, analyses, records, backgrounds: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

“One of the minor members of Moriarty’s Trieste branch is bedding down in Southampton. Designer drugs, aimed at teenagers, he’s looking to be a modern Fagin. Do something with him.”

“Have him arrested, you mean, sir?”

“If you must. Other interesting options present themselves. The rival gang from Torquay, for instance.”

And away she would go, with files to study, teams to work with, and she would return, weeks later, slapping a file on the desk. “Done, sir.”

He would fold his hands together and look up at her, not bothering to read the files. He would take in the cuts and bruises, scrapes on her knuckles, a faint limp. A steady gaze and a proud tilt to her head. “Arrested after all, then, Donovan.”

“By Interpol, sir, yes.”

“Yes. Not quite what I expected.”

“A manufactured turf war just gets civilians killed, sir.”

“But a simple arrest does not get us deeper in, Donovan.”

“No, sir, but compromising the second in command, bugging the backup HQ and slipping an undercover agent into the regime change does. Without killing civilians. Sir.”

Mycroft Holmes regarded her with faint surprise, an eyebrow lifted, an unforeseen laugh emerging and suppressed in a breath. She was unexpected, this Sally Donovan. A little defiant. Ruthless, but principled, by the book. Not afraid of a little blood, but she didn’t fight dirty to be brutal, or merely to win – but to win quickly, to minimise the harm.

Time and again, she surprised him with her strength and integrity. She fought hard to win, and though she sometimes lost, she kept focused on the next battle, the next opportunity. With his intel and her courage; his resources, her determination: oh, they made significant inroads on that trailing, insidious poison of Moriarty’s regime.

Their briefings shifted from professional courtesy to downright personal pleasure.

Sally Donovan, Mycroft liked to see, was always full of bite. Even when she failed, or was wrong, and he tore strips off her in no uncertain terms, she would take it, learn from it, but not be cowed.  He found that she intrigued him, with her uprightness and resistance to underhand technique. She was thorough, unyielding, energetic, exemplary in a crisis.

Mycroft Holmes, Sally liked to see, had a strange habit of almost-smiling, almost-laughing, almost-unbending when she challenged him as well as when she reported a success. There was something on the edges of him that intrigued her. She learned to trust him, even when he wasn’t giving her all the facts. She always had enough to do what needed to be done, and he trusted her to do it well.

She discovered that he had a sense of humour, dark and dry, and that he made her laugh. She discovered that she liked the look of him, with his eyes crinkling at her laughter.

She brought him a gift one day, something ridiculous, a stick of Brighton rock, the name Brighton written through the middle of it in scarlet peppermint-flavoured sugar. “Thought you might like a souvenir, sir, since I’m not allowed to bring you a head on a pike.” He’d laughed then, properly for a moment, before swallowing up the sound. It had made her feel warm.

One day, Mycroft, having to be somewhere else shortly, diverted the meeting from his office to a nearby café, one of Theirs, perfectly safe. It was raining, and he had that umbrella, the canopy of it re-covered since that unfortunate encounter with the cow at Chingford Plains. Sally admired the workmanship of it. Well, last time she’d seen the thing it had looked like a giant, battered black jellyfish, and said so. It made him laugh, gently, the sound of it not bitten off for a change.  

Mycroft ordered coffee for them both, and Sally ordered cake because goddamn she needed a sugar boost today, and she noticed his curtailed look at it. It reminded her of the way he swallowed laughter, so she didn’t finish the cake. Instead, she offered him the fork. “This is delicious, but I can’t eat another bite. Would you like some, sir?”

His hand had moved towards the fork before he’d thought, and then he had to take it or look indecisive. So he pushed the smallest bite onto the tines, carefully slipped the cake between his lips and drew the sliver of cream and sponge into his mouth. Just that little bite, and she could see how much he enjoyed it, eyes closed, the way his lips pressed shut to keep the flavour in. The soft bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. When he opened his eyes, she was looking out the window, oblivious as you please, commenting on the easing of the rain.

Unless their meeting needed the security of the office, they always met at the café after that. Or they’d retire to the café after the briefing. Every time, she’d order something sweet, not finish it, let him take just the tiny bite he allowed himself.

He would tell her what Sherlock and the crowd had been up to, and she would agree with him that, God, these people needed watching, even against their own wills, because, seriously, they sometimes lacked the good sense that God gave a rock.

Between her abrasiveness and his liquid smoothness, something happened when they got together. She became more fluid. He developed a certain texture. As he’d found something strong and ruthless to build in her, she found something gentler to nurture in him. He found that he wanted to let her.

She found she could wheedle moments of truthfulness, straightforwardness, out of him. She found traction in the smoke.

One day Mycroft was watching her from the car, as she arrived at the café, and he thought how much he liked the way she moved, and the sardonic way she looked at him. Respectful, certainly, but not at all servile. She laughed at him sometimes. He liked that too.

Sally sat in the café and watched him step out of the car and cross the street. She looked at the way he moved, his grace, and the lilts of aborted smiles and truncated laughter that would escape when he failed to keep complete control. The way he damn well enjoyed those little mouthfuls of cake and his very sensuous way of eating them.

It was unexpected to realise how much she looked forward to their meetings. To finding ways to make him smile by bringing him strange little gifts, useless souvenirs and peculiar mementoes; by teasing him just a little; laughing at him, just a little.

Then one day there was no time for the café, so he told her to meet him that evening, gave her the address, and he took her to dinner. They talked business, as always, but he showed her how to properly scoop a lobster from the tail, and how to appreciate the wine. She gave him a tie pin made of amber, feeling a bit stupid, because his taste was so refined and she just liked the golden, warm glow of it, which is how he made her feel when she succeeded in surprising him with the outcome of a mission, or coaxing a laugh out of him. He put the tie pin on, with that secret real smile of his, and at dessert she offered him a bite, and he licked it off the fork and their eyes met and … it was also not expected. The charge, going both ways.

 _I have father fixations_ , Sally thought for a moment, _I used to have a crush on Greg Lestrade, just a little one, and now I have a crush on Mycroft Holmes, but it doesn’t feel like simply a crush, and he is nothing like my father._

 _I do not fraternise with the staff_ , thought Mycroft, _they are all pawns, tools in the game, oh but I like her, I like this game, her and me. I wouldn’t make her the queen; queens can be sacrificed for the king, and she would do that, I think, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to sacrifice her. I want to hold her in reserve and keep her close. She can be my knight, instead._

After dinner, he held his umbrella over her while they waited for the car in the rain. When it came, he suggested giving her a lift home. She got into the car and they sat, much closer than necessary.

Sally placed a hand to the umbrella handle, ran her fingers over it, and asked about its provenance. “You said it was like a samurai sword.”

“Yes,” said Mycroft, placing his hand over hers and guiding her fingers so that they drew the blade partly out together. “The core of it belonged to my grandfather. It was a sword stick then. I had it modified.” He talked her through its history, but did not move his hand, and she didn’t move hers either.

Sally Donovan, Mycroft thought, understood the concept of bushido, lived it. Mycroft was more of a shogun, if the analogy was to be extended. Then he thought that the whole noble warrior/master analogy was overstretched and tedious anyway.

In the shadows of the smoked windows, in the creak of leather of the vast and comfortable back seat, Mycroft leaned towards Sally and kissed the skin beside her mouth. She closed her eyes and tilted her face towards him, her other hand settling over his fingers and hers on the curve of the umbrella.

He kissed the other side of her mouth, at the corner of her lips, and the soft skin next to her eyes, and the bridge of her nose. He breathed and drew back, and she pressed her nose against the pulse in his throat, ghosted her lips against his pale, pale skin.

She didn’t go to his home that night. He didn’t go to hers then either.

But the next dinner was not at a restaurant. It was in a small chamber in elegant rooms that were not his home, not his office, but some other place that was private and secure. Sally fed him dessert again, and let him see her watching him as he swallowed and his tongue drifted over his lower lip to capture the last trace of sugar.

The car drove them to her home. ‘It’s not much,” she said, “It’s nothing like you’re used to.”

He smiled, because of course he already knew everything about her little flat, and he said: “You are nothing like I’m used to. And yet…”

So Mycroft went up to her modest, tidy, tiny flat with her, and they kissed. She hung his coat, his scarf, his shirt, his trousers, carefully minding the creases, because she respected that he was fastidious, and because she wasn’t in any hurry.

He was suddenly uncertain, then, and so she kissed his hands, which she loved, those sure and expressive fingers. Uncertainty fled. He kissed her again.

That first night, his skin so pale, hers so dark, they really were not in any hurry. He surprised her by being not at all restrained. He smiled, laughed, let the small sounds of pleasure emerge and finish unswallowed. Sally surprised him by being not demanding but giving, as though she wanted to unlock him, wanted him to let go, and she would hold onto him, if he would only trust her to do so. And he did, so she did.

He touched and kissed and tasted her, a delicious dessert, sweet skin and secret delights. He tasted her frugally at first, then lavishly, of her mouth and throat and breasts and spine and cunt. She likewise indulged herself in him, revelled in his letting go, revelled in being strong and trusted.

On their third night together, she brought out her grandmother’s pure silk scarf, cloud grey, soft and flowing like air, the only really perfect thing she owned. She draped it over his naked shoulders and gently, gently pulled it down his back, over his bum and his belly and his chest. She didn’t try to tie him in it. He already tied himself down enough; he restricted and denied himself all the time. So, no. She flowed it over him instead, letting him react to the whisper of it, on his arms, on his nipples and his thighs and his cock and his feet. He was a sensual creature, under the three piece suits and the measured gestures, and the ruthless constraint, but with her he simply let go.

In the mornings, they showered together, washed each other, took the time. Then she helped him to dress, replacing all his armour for the day. She let him teach her how to make a proper knot in his tie, and placed his amber tie pin just so. All neat and precise and controlled again, what he needed for the day.

The car picked him up, leaving Sally to drive to her latest mission. She had a job to do too, after all, and he trusted her to do it. Trusted her to survive it and to return to him, so they could continue their mutual redemption and their mutual salvation.

There were no sentimental texts, nothing so gauche, but she found little sweet gifts at her apartment, in her car, slipped into the files he gave her.  Small exquisite pieces of chocolate, little pots of exotic honey, jars and packages and ricepaper-thin leaves of delicious things she saved to spread on him, and he on her, and they delighted in each other’s sweetness – a fact that would have astounded no end the people who thought neither of them had sweetness in them.

It was only three weeks of this confounding bliss before they were taken. Taken and battered and nearly killed, except for courage and blood, and that he was smoke and she was hard, and that they absolutely refused to let each other go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title, Blood Sugar Love, is a song by The Real Tuesday Weld.


	7. Under My Umbrella

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft Holmes and Sally Donovan are seeking redemption for their failures by working together to complete the demolition of Moriarty's criminal empire. But unfinished business is about to catch up with them. 
> 
> Caring is not an advantage, until it is the thing that you use to save each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter follows from Blood Sugar Love. The title is from Rihanna's Umbrella.  
> Note: The chapter contains strong language.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how careful you are, how professional, how sharp. Sometimes, your luck is just bad.

That morning, standing on the kerb waiting for the car to collect Mr Holmes before Agent Donovan drove to Bristol to start work on a new lead, Mycroft and Sally were just out of luck.

Certainly the kidnap team was very professional, very fast: it’s what they were paid for. They expertly blocked the route of the government car, and the moment the driver realised it, he responded to his training rather than dithering. He levelled a gun at the motorbike driver, but he didn’t see the window washer to the right and was shot through the temple for his pains.

A van swooped to the kerb in front of the government man and his agent, waiting side by side, not touching, not even holding hands, just colleagues perhaps, but hey, they weren’t paid to quibble. Get Holmes, they’d been told, get the agent with him if she’s there.  So they neutralised Holmes’s car, they neutralised the agents watching in the street (one shot in the throat, the other garrotted) and they got Holmes and the black woman. Biker and window washer piled into the van as well, and then they were all gone. The whole thing took fifty seven seconds.

The agent put up a good fight, but there wasn’t much room in the back of the van, and a double punch to the temple put her out of commission soon enough. Not hard after that. Deliver the goods to the bugfuck crazy client, collect the dosh, leave. Nice and easy.

Well, except for the magnetised bomb slipped behind the van’s rear tyre by the bugfuck crazy client’s slightly less deranged offsider, which fifteen minutes later destroyed van, witnesses, dosh and all in the middle of the M25.

Bugfuck crazy Sebastian Moran may have been, but he wasn’t _stupid._ If there had to be a trail – and it was almost impossible to completely delete one – make it a _bonfire_ , make it _ashes_ , make them _work_ to find him.

It gave him a few hours. He could be finished and gone and on with Step 2 before tea time. He’d turn that trail into a conflagration, too, before he was done. If he couldn’t burn the heart out of Sherlock Holmes, like Jim had wanted, then he would damn well burn everything else to cinders.

Sally came to, handcuffed to bare pipes on the wall.  She kept her eyes closed, aware of the pain in her throbbing head. Aware that it was concrete under her legs, brick against her back. Aware of the breathing of at least two other people, oddly echoing, as though the room were otherwise empty. The cold, raw echo of some storerooms, of smaller spaces in warehouses. Aware of the sound of seagulls and distant ships’ horns. Aware that there were no cars, so no roads, nearby. Aware of the smell of diesel, brackish water and blood. A trickle of it ran down her face.

Aware that she and Mycroft were in so, so, so much trouble.

The sound that woke her repeated itself, and Sally Donovan forced one eye open a sliver so that she could see.

She nearly closed it again, watching the tall, scruffy, rangy man take the hammer and smash it a second time onto Mycroft’s left hand. Mycroft gasped, skin dead white in shock, and pressed his mouth shut.

 _He suppresses pain too_ , thought Sally, _not just pleasure_. _Thank god. His control might help him this time._

The motherfucker with the hammer lifted Mycroft’s hand to review the broken pinkie finger. Sally caught his profile, then, and didn’t recognise him, until she remembered the report, and realised who it must have been. Only he was supposed to be dead.

Former Colonel Sebastian Moran, Jim Moriarty’s right hand man, was dead in a dirty alley in Lvov, shot in the face by Sherlock Holmes during the year that Sherlock was supposed to be dead. The year he died so he could save his friends. Sally was one of the few who knew what exactly he’d gone through. It had been part of her briefing, to prepare for this redemptive mission to destroy the dregs of Moriarty’s empire.

Well, obviously Moran had been _left_ for dead rather than been _actually_ dead. She could see why, in the pitted ruin of what was left of Moran’s face. The left side of his head was misshapen. Dented. A crater of skin and scars where his eye used to be, the bones of his cheek and eyebrow shattered. Moran couldn’t see her, blind as he was on that side. Not that it helped her, chained to the wall. But it _might_ help her. _It might._

Sally opened both eyes a crack and looked around. So far, only the three of them here. Moran had at least one accomplice, had to have, but not in here. Not yet. Weapons? The handcuffs she wore, if she could get herself free. The hammer, if she could get it away from Moran. A knife and a gun both on the table next to ( _beloved, beautiful, hold on I’m coming_ ) Mycroft. Mycroft’s umbrella, propped against the wall.

All right. That was enough to start with. Sally Donovan could make something with that.

Carefully, she twisted her hands, getting her fingers against the winding mechanism of her watch. She had been due to return to the field today, and she had been equipped.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, she withdrew the winding mechanism, which was a pin, and twisted her hands some more.

She began to pick the lock of the handcuffs.

In the meantime, Moran inspected Mycroft’s broken finger with dissatisfaction.

“I can’t decide whether to send your brother pieces of you, or simply leave the pulp of all of you on his doorstep.”

Mycroft’s jaw was tight, but little else betrayed the immense pain he must have been in.

“You overestimate my value to my brother, Colonel Moran,” said Mycroft coolly, his voice completely his own, “Sherlock and I are not friends. There is a reason my name was not among the three your late employer identified.”

Moran scowled. “Still. You’re a good place to start. Until I can get my hands on that copper. I’ll work my way back up to that little doctor of his. The copper’s family might be a nice warning shot, if you won’t do. He’s got two little boys, I hear.”

Mycroft looked bored, untouched. “You and I are men of the world, Colonel Moran. If you are trying to horrify me with the baseness of your moral character by threatening violence to infants, you really must try harder. It is entirely possible I have seen things more horrific than you could ever dream of, even with your enviable track record in antisocial behaviour.”

Moran struck Mycroft on the left clavicle with the hammer. Sally heard the bone crack and Mycroft stifled grunt of pain.

 _I’m going to get you, Sebastian Moran. I am going to cut out your one good eye._ Sally’s fingers worked the pin in the handcuffs, willing herself to calmness. She’d never trip the lock if she let her hands shake.

Mycroft bent his will to suppress the agony, to control his breathing, to gather around him smoke and slipperiness, his armour. He did well, though he couldn’t quite get his breathing to track.

“You are surely… well outside Moriarty’s purview… by now. You were… to shoot the good doctor… only if…”

“Well, Jim is dead, and I’m not exactly a crack shot anymore, seeing as how you need two good eyes for that, so I guess I’m freelance now. I can do what I fucking like.”

“There are always… opportunities. For men. Like you.”

“Are you offering me a job, Mr Holmes?”

“I am suggesting… that there are… alternatives… to suicide.”

“Is that what you think this is?”

“Oh, Colonel. That is what I know this is.”

The hammer came down on the knuckle below Mycroft’s smashed pinkie finger. A cry escaped him that time.

“I’m going to break every bone in your body,” said Moran, “Long before I’m dead, you’ll be wishing you were.”

The lock on the handcuffs clicked, and Moran’s head turned in her direction. No left eye, but his ear seemed to work just fine, fuck it all.

“Moriarty would be disgusted if he could see you,” said Mycroft, his tone light and urbane and smooth like silk or tempered steel, “Or he would laugh,” he added, a little thoughtful wonder laced through the words, “He had a strange sense of humour. Look at the orders he gave you.”

It almost worked. It really almost did. Moran turned back towards Mycroft, raised the hammer, and Sally shoved up with her feet, launching herself at the umbrella. She had it, she had the blade drawn, she was so close, so close, but Moran had not been raising the hammer for Mycroft.

Moran rose and turned and swung the hammer at Sally, who was much too close, and the head of it caught her on the forearm. But she had the sword, and that’s what counted, except that Moran, fucking Moran, the motherfucking one-eyed shit-sucking, piss-cock was damaged but he was fast and nimble, used to operating on more senses than just his sight, and he grabbed her wrist and they fought for the blade.

Sally lost the sword to him, and it came hissing towards her. She still held the sheath in her left hand, the sheath made of the canopy and steel, and she managed to bring it up in time to block the blow. She transferred the sheath to her right hand then, her dominant hand, because it was better than nothing, which was all she had, but too late, far too late and Moran lunged…

…and that samurai blade, tempered and sharp – it could slice skin and bone like cake, that blade – and it sank into her shoulder, below the scapula, below the joint, through muscle and tissue and through to the wall behind her.

She heard Mycroft’s tortured breath and their eyes met, and he wasn’t smoke now, though he was trying. For her sake he was trying. She could see him crushing it down, how her pain made him feel, how her pain hurt him. She wanted him to succeed. How could it help him now, to be real?

A lifetime of restraint, of ‘no’ and of denial, and she could see him unravelling – and she wouldn’t have it. She would not have him stripped and laid bare for this crazy, one-eyed, murderous, monstrous freak to play with.

The steel blade was buried right through her, and Moran’s pitted face was pressed close to hers, that one bloodshot eye a dictionary definition of _out of his fucking mind_. But Sally’s right hand – on Moran’s blind side – was clutched convulsively around the sheath. The part of that samurai umbrella that was meant to be shelter. That sturdy umbrella with its steel spokes and its shining metal tip.

“You’re… crazier… than that demented fuck-up you called a boss,” she said, banked fire in her dark eyes.

Moran snarled, leaned in closer, his body taut.

The banked fire flared, flames roaring within and she thrust up: hard, fast, unerring.

The tip of the umbrella sheath punctured Moran’s throat. Went through his mouth, and blood gushed out down his front and hers, and up through the roof of his mouth and into his bugfuck crazy brain.

And it cost her.  Dear God, it cost her, with the pull on her whole body of that upward thrust, and then Moran’s dead weight falling against the hilt of the sword, twisting it in the wound.

But it did not cost her as much as failing would have.

Moran’s body fell away from her. Sally’s voice was a shattered whimper. The blade was still embedded in her body. But there was an accomplice. At least one. This wasn’t done yet.

Sally kept her feet, stumbled towards Mycroft. She had to hang onto the edge of the table for a moment, while she assessed. Mycroft – _broken, beautiful, alive, mine, mine, my own_ – Mycroft was tied by his right hand to a pipe with plastic strips. Knife for those. Fine. Yes.  A gun. Good. Yes. Phone. Mycroft’s. Yes.

She took the knife, bent (and the blood rushed and the agony washed over her like acid, blanking her brain) but she kept moving anyway, cutting at the plastic tie like it was suffocating her (which it was, it was). Both of his hands were free now, the whole one, the smashed one.

“Gun, Sally,” came that calm voice, in control, smoke again. She handed the gun down to him, moving gingerly. “Good.”

She heard a door open and staggered, her hand going to the hilt protruding from her chest, because it was the only weapon near, and it was going to hurt like fuck to pull out, and maybe make her haemorage, but there wasn’t anything for it now…

But Mycroft raised his good hand, raised the gun, and fired a single shot. The man at the door fell before he was even fully in the room, a neat round hole in the middle of his forehead.

Mycroft breathed a tiny, annoyed sigh. His mouth crooked in a brief smile. “And people ask why I hate field work.”

Sally Donovan looked at that smile, that buttoned down, ironic, dry smile, and as she looked, a different expression came over his face. A quiver, a horror at what had nearly become of them, and gratitude too, because they had survived. And, after all of that, love. He looked at her, unconstrained, and let her see the love.

Sally Donovan fucking _loved_ Mycroft Holmes, fucking _loved_ this brilliant, controlled, deadly man who showed his real face to her.

“Phone, Sally,” said that beloved voice, still gentle and calm, and she handed it to him as she slithered to her knees.

“Here, love,” he said. He had placed the gun on the floor beside his damaged left hand. He held his arms out and she tilted slightly, and he drew his good arm around her, pulled her softly down to the ground. She sprawled between the V of his legs. He had to move carefully, with the blade still piercing her. Her head was on his good shoulder, her breathing ragged.

He entered the code and made his call. “Identify yourself before you come in,” he said coldly at the end, “I don’t know who else is here. I will be shooting dead anyone who attempts to enter without first giving the word. I’m leaving the line open so you can trace our location…. An ambulance, yes. Be quick. She’s losing a lot of blood.”

He left the phone next to the gun, still transmitting. Then he gathered her as close as he could, between his injuries and hers, and rubbed his cheek against her cold, clammy brow.

“Hold on, love,” he said to her, “They’re coming.”

“I…I..Mmmmyc…”

“Shh. Hush now.”

“H-h-h-he…”

“I can’t take the blade out of you. It will do more damage on the way out.”

“I kn-kn-know.”

“It may be slowing the bleeding, where it is.”

“I kn-know.”

“I’m sorry.”       

“Shh,” she managed in reply, “Shh. S’all r’t.”

“It isn’t,” he disagreed softly, “But it’s the truth.”

They sat for a few moments, his cheek pressed to her forehead. Her breathing harsh. His measured, or trying to be. After a long moment, he pressed an awkward kiss to her skin.

“I have always admired Franco Corelli,” he said, from nowhere, “Such a masterful voice. I do not have anything like his prowess. But I like to sing. Or I used to.”

 _Another thing_ , Sally thought dimly, _that he has had to suppress and constrain and deny himself_.

But he took a breath, and though his voice was strained with pain and fatigue and distress for her, he sang in a beautiful, soothing tenor.

_La fleur que tu m’avais jetée_

_dans ma prison m’était restée._

_Flétrie et sèche, cette fleur_

_Gardait toujours sa douce odeur;_

_Et pendant de heures entières_

_Sur mes yeux, fermant mes paupières,_

_De cette odeur je m’enivrais_

_Et dans la nuit je te voyais!_

He didn’t care who heard him at the end of the phone. He didn’t care about anything except shielding her with his voice, when he could not shield her with anything else.

The recovery team, deployed since the moment they were taken, searching ins circles outward from the bomb wreckage on the motorway, found them in three minutes fourteen seconds.

Mycroft refused a separate ambulance. He sat beside Sally, dosed up with painkillers for his smashed bones, while the emergency team worked on her to remove the blade and stop the bleeding. He sang to her, because he could see that she responded even after she lost consciousness. He could see her eyelids flicker, and it was all he could do, and it was everything he could do, so that’s what he did.

When she woke up in hospital, he was seated beside her bed, bandaged in clean white linen himself. She couldn’t speak yet, still groggy from anaesthetics and painkillers, but that didn’t matter. She smiled relief at him, and he smiled his real smile at her, and held her hand, and sang opera for her.

In the late evening, when she was properly conscious, Mycroft deliberately and consciously offered Sally the self that no-one before her had ever wanted and promised her anything he could ever give her, if she would only stay with him always. Sally smiled and kissed his fingers and said, of course, of course, of course, of course, my love.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft sings La fleur que tu m’avais jetée from Carmen at the end.


	8. Enemies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of their kidnapping and recovery, Mycroft Holmes and Sally Donovan are visited by an old enemy. An old arch enemy? Maybe those old labels don't really belong to them and Sherlock any more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Shinedown's Enemies, which has been used as a Collared song in the story 'Collared'.

Sherlock rarely visited his brother’s home. He actively avoided it. That he was here, now, spoke of some emergency or a great need. The emergency had passed weeks before, but the need was still there.

Sherlock resented it. He resented feeling guilty as well. He wouldn’t even necessarily have classified the feeling as guilt – it was not an emotion he had much personal experience of – but it was something, anyway. Something beyond that twinge of ruthlessly repressed anxiety when he’d first heard that Mycroft had been kidnapped, and again when he learned that Mycroft and Sally Donovan had been recovered, alive but wounded.

Mycroft was in his study. His left arm was still in a sling, keeping his collarbone stable, and his hand was splinted and bandaged.  As Sherlock entered the room, Mycroft glanced up from the papers he was reading at the study table, frowned. “Are you here to bring grapes and a get well soon card, or to make a record of how exceedingly well the repercussions of my failures with Moriarty have come home to roost?”

“Your get well wishes are from Mrs Hudson and John,” said Sherlock, a certain terse who-cares note in his voice, as he placed a cake tin and a small parcel on the sideboard. “As for your failings, I suppose there’s some value in seeing that neither of us escaped unscathed.”

Mycroft nodded, as though that were only fair, and bent his head back to the reports.

Sherlock stuffed his hands in his coat pockets, prowled to the bookshelf, back to the centre of the room, over to the sideboard, back to the middle of the carpet, scowled.

“I’m sorry,” he said, so quickly and angrily that the syllables nearly vanished. But Mycroft heard them well enough. He raised his head again. Arched an eyebrow.

“Sorry?”

“Moran was supposed to be dead. I killed him. I shot him in the head. I should have shot him again. To make sure.”

“My report of the aftermath,” said Mycroft carefully, “Clearly shows that you were seriously injured at the time yourself. There wasn’t…” he paused, considering, and his voice softened, “That was one of those periods where we didn’t hear from you for weeks. We feared the worst. It nearly became the worst, I understand.”

“Nearly. Not quite,” said Sherlock dismissively, but he couldn’t suppress the shudder, because it nearly had. The call he’d finally managed to place, on the wrong day, the wrong time, but they were waiting for him still, and John and Mrs Hudson had sang to him and he’d managed to survive after all. He swallowed hard against the memory and its aftershocks. “I should have made sure. Once he knew I was alive, I knew he’d come for me. For John. I thought I’d stopped him.”

“Really, Sherlock, it’s a miracle you didn’t. I suppose I could admire Moran’s tenacity, if I hadn’t been on its receiving end.”

Sherlock’s eyes flinched slightly. “I don’t know why he came for you. You weren’t…”

Mycroft placed his pen on the desk. “He could hardly have followed his original instructions, Sherlock. You had crippled him. A marksman needs both eyes. The one he had left was beginning to fail him as well. He had to get close, and he knew he’d never be able to get close enough to Baker Street. I was simply… convenient.”

They both snorted at this concept of ‘convenient’.

“Still,” said Sherlock stubbornly, “I should have finished the job. Moran would never have been able to…” Sherlock waved towards Mycroft’s bandages.

Sherlock heard a footfall and turned to see, to his surprise, Sally Donovan in the doorway. She was barefoot, dressed in loose trackpants and a flowing T-shirt, her posture and gait still mindful of her damaged body. Sally didn’t move, just watched Sherlock as he made all of his deductions in two seconds flat, and denied nothing by word or gesture. _Mycroft and me, yes, that’s right, and I don’t care if you like it or not, or approve or not, or understand or not._

Sherlock swallowed.

“I should have made sure he was dead,” he repeated to her, his voice flat, “I was certain that he was. I…” his gaze was lingering over her shoulder wound, bulky with dressings under her shirt, “He was a sadist and a true psychopath.”

“He was one crazy motherfucker, all right,” she agreed.

“I’m… sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she said.

“Not ‘fault’, perhaps. Responsibility, though. I knew his orders. I knew what he was capable of.”

Sally drew a steadying breath and thought, once more, how wrong she had been about Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock was the unraveller of puzzles. He untied the knots and created order. He didn’t enjoy watching others scrabble around in the chaos, failing to understand. That gave him no pleasure at all, just like killing gave him no pleasure. Killing lacked finesse. It was an ugly, messy, brutal way to solve problems. Unavoidable sometimes, but not what he would choose. She understood that now. The two of them were more alike, in that sense, than she ever would have guessed.

They were not cold blooded killers, for all that they had chosen to kill. They killed to protect what they loved, when there were no choices left.

“It’s finished now,” was all she said, “He can’t hurt anyone ever again. Moran will never get the chance to go for John. For any of them.”

Sherlock clenched his fist, but not before she saw the tremor in his hand. She didn’t comment.

“No,” he agreed softly, “Thank you.” He frowned and stepped towards her, dropped his head to say, very quietly, “Thank you for my brother, too.”

Over Sherlock’s shoulder, Sally saw Mycroft’s good hand flex, the fingers reaching briefly towards Sherlock before the digits curled into his palm and he placed his hand back on the table. _Another thing he wants and tells himself he can’t have_ , she thought. She hated that. She wanted Mycroft to always have those things he denied himself.

“Mycroft was for me, not for you,” Sally replied, also very quietly.

Unexpectedly, Sherlock smiled at that.

“I must be off,” he said, back to his usual energetic tone, “Enjoy Mrs Hudson’s get well gift. John has sent something too, but I really can’t say if it’s a gift or a punishment of some kind.” He disappeared in a riot of coat and hair and scarf, more like the Sherlock Holmes that Sally was used to. It was a relief to see it, really.

Mycroft had risen to inspect the small parcel on top of the cake box. It was a music disk – his brother’s ludicrous band had produced a charity CD, it appeared, to raise money for police orphans and widows or some such.

A small card stated, in typically scrappy medical handwriting: “I know you don’t like our stuff, so feel free to use this as a coaster or a Frisbee – but it includes Sherlock and his violin, as well as my appalling caterwauling, so I thought you might like it anyway. Get well soon, or I might send you one of the old Gladstone’s Collar albums to see if I can hurry you along. Regards, John.”

Mycroft decided to place the card with those sent to Sally by Thaddeus Anderson, DI Lestrade and family, and others of her old team at the Met as well as some of her colleagues in her new role.

“Oh, lovely!” Sally had prised the lid off the tin and was regarding the contents with immense delight. Little cupcakes, the tops cut off and made into butterfly wings, embedded in the rich cream cheese icing, were packed snugly into the container. A note in Mrs Hudson’s flowery handwriting told Mycroft and Sally to enjoy their recovery, not meaning it, Mycroft was sure, quite as literally as the two of them were in fact enjoying it.

Sally took out a cupcake, swiped a finger through the creamy icing and sucked it into her mouth with lavish appreciation. Then she kissed Mycroft, transferring the sweet delight from her mouth to his, with his full and enthusiastic cooperation.

At the end of the kiss, she plucked up one of the cakey wings, icing still clinging to it, and fed it to him. Mycroft sucked her fingers into his mouth and licked the crumbs away with his usual reverence for both the treat and for her skin. He kissed her again after that.

“You know,” he said eventually, mouth against her jaw and her ear and her throat, “When I suggested you move in with me for the period of your recovery, I didn’t really intend that you should ever leave.”

Sally laughed and kissed his throat above his Adam’s apple; opened a button on his shirt and kissed below it; and another button, and she kissed the hollow above his sternum, “Did you pack the scarf?”

“Of course.”

“Good.”

And within the limitations of their injuries, Mycroft and Sally spent an afternoon enjoying their recovery very, very much.

 


	9. Bring It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John dress up in their sexy queer best to go undercover at a gay bar. Then someone slips John a mickey. John's response is... atypical. Dancing, singing, epic swearfests, teaching someone a lesson and declarations of I FUCKING LOVE YOU ensue. 
> 
> Warning: Use of a date rape drug, which is not in itself in the slightest bit funny. Arseholes are taught a thorough lesson, though, which i hope makes up for it.

Sherlock was of course aware that his friend John Watson had a certain appeal for men as well as women. That John was not aware of this was fairly typical, Sherlock thought. John frequently saw but failed spectacularly to observe.

Thus it was that Sherlock blamed himself for a good portion of what happened. John had no idea that he could attract that kind of attention, and so was not sufficiently on his guard. No wonder someone was able to slip a mickey into his drink. It had never occurred to him that anyone would try to do such a thing at a gay night club. He'd been looking out for the accountant, not arseholes trying to get into his pants the easy way.

Sherlock may not have fancied John in the biblical sense, but Sherlock knew how to dress for a part, and how to dress someone else for a part.  With this in mind, he had instructed John very precisely on his costume for the evening. Tight blue jeans, worn a low, letting his pants show. _Not those ugly things, John, try these red ones._   Tight black shirt. Dog tags out. A little more product in his hair than usual. The collar John had worn, at Molly’s insistence, for the Collared photo shoot when they did that charity EP.

(Molly had made them all wear collars for that, and then given Greg Lestrade eat-you-alive looks for the whole afternoon that had made Greg blush and John roar with laughter, and Tad had given Sherlock a funny sideways look and then said he looked like a giraffe in a choker, and then giggled all afternoon, and what a circus, though Sherlock reluctantly admitted that the resulting poster and album cover had probably helped sales a lot.)

“I feel like  twat.”

“You look like a twat, John, but you will fit right in. No point going undercover to a gay night club and looking like an uncomfortable straight man. It’s not very _under cover.”_

“I’m uncomfortable looking like a male stripper, Sherlock, not with being in a gay bar.”

“You do not look like a male stripper.”

“Thank you.”

“Though you do, as you say, look like a twat.”

“And thank you again.” A sigh. “There’s nowhere in this outfit for me to wear my gun. Please don’t get us shot at tonight. I don’t really want to have to strangle anyone to death with my G string.”

All in all, the evening went well. Sherlock stunned the punters with the power of his sexy and managed to finagle his way behind the scenes to check out the office and the manager’s dual sets of rosters while John guarded the door. (His way of guarding the door was to lean against it, arms folded, showing off his excellent upper arms, a hint of red underwear and a fraction of slightly hairy stomach, and lifting his chin defiantly – so that he unwittingly showed the collar off to best advantage – and then tell anyone who approached that he was with someone.)

Then Sherlock had slipped back into the bar, pointed in the direction of a paunchy floor manager and told John to get a drink and watch out for the accountant while Sherlock went to pick a pocket or two.

Sherlock picked up the set of keys he needed, slipped back into the office and found the cabinet containing the duplicate security footage on disk, returned the keys without being spotted and realised he’d lost track of John. This was unfortunate, because they needed to leave now, before Lestrade got here with the arresting team. That is, if John wanted an opportunity to change into something less slutty before the Met showed up to take pictures.

 Sherlock’s gaze darted around the bar, trying to see where John had gone, when the dulcet tones of his flatmate bellowed across the room.

“Christ on a fucking _pogo stick_ , _do not grab my cock without asking_! That's just fucking _rude_ , goddamnit.”

Sherlock’s gaze was arrested by the site of John Watson, standing on small stage, glaring at the bloke in tight black leather trousers in front of him. Leather trousers backed off a step. John nodded.

And resumed singing.

And dancing.

 _Well, John_ , thought Sherlock in some amazement, and not a little admiration, _you can certainly dance like a male stripper._

John was singing some dreadful pop song that Sherlock didn’t recognise (when did he ever?). He was moving with the microphone and stand in a carnal way that was normally restricted by the presence of his guitar, writhing his pelvis and chest against the rod of metal, one arm raised to pump to the beat.

 _Because now_  
The time has come for your devotion  
And you already got the motion

 A small circle of captivated young men were gathered in front of the stage, clapping and cheering approval. John, feeling the music deeply, it seemed, growled low into a harmony part and shimmied his hips.

Leather Trousers made another grab for John’s crotch. John grabbed the outstretched hand, bent it back in an excrutiating hold and snarled at the perpetrator. “ _FUCKING. RUDE_.”

“May I?” called out one of the young turks nearby.

“No,” John said emphatically, “I’m in the middle of my number.” And he resumed the karaoke and dancing with a look of immense determination.

 _Tonight I am a drug you can’t deny_  
Tonight – G.A.B.  gonna get you high  
My love is electric  
HEY HEY HEY my love is electric!!

Sherlock strode across the room, held his hand up to John and glared at him when John didn’t take the hand.

“Heeey!” John grinned and sort of danced at Sherlock.

“Time to go, John.”

“No, no, no, no, no. I’m singing now.”

“John, someone has drugged your drink.”

“Why would they do that? C’mon, Sherlock, dance with me.”

“No, John, I’m taking you home.”

John drew away to hit a high note that Sherlock hadn’t realised John could reach before throwing himself into the next lines. At the same time he did something clever with his feet and his hips and his arms and Sherlock was once more reminded of Sally Donovan recently referring to John as Doctor Sex. It struck Sherlock that if Sally could see John now, without a guitar in the way, she might possibly lose the power of speech altogether.

_I got electric eyes  
And I can get you high_

Then John grinned at the ogling crowd and pointed at Sherlock, who was as pretty as a picture in his tight black trousers and black net shirt that showed his alabaster skin to great advantage. “ _He’s ma date_.” Then John crowed with laughter. “A **date**. Where two people who like each other go out and have fun. And then get shot at. And wind up in the Thames. Or dressed as ninjas. Or trapped in cupboards with fucking _ponies_. It’s fucking _hilarious_.” He danced a bit more, thrusting his hips at the audience and then turning to shimmy his very nice arse at them.

Sherlock hooked his fingers into the back of John’s jeans and pulled him bodily off the stage.

“No fair,” complained John, “I was a shoo-in to win the karaoke competition.”

“Yes, John, you were, and I will give you a trophy made of paracetamol and tea when we get home.”

Mollified by the promise, John grabbed hold of Sherlock’s net shirt and wobbled out of the building in his wake. They paused briefly at the bar while Sherlock, deducing who had spiked John’s drink, punched Leather Trousers, the filthy bastard, in the face. Leather Trousers protested, so Sherlock explained why he was the lowest kind of guttertrash, and punched him again.

“Tha’s **_right_**!” hollered John, “Fucking **RUDE**. Do **NOT** grab my **COCK** without my **PERMISSION**.”

Leather Trousers then made the very bad mistake of seeking revenge for the thwarting of his sick and fucked up plans. He snatched up a cocktail glass and swung it at Sherlock’s face, intending, if possible, to blind the pretty fucker with the shards.

The first punch was to his temple, the second to his solar plexus, the third to his nose, which broke with a gush of blood, and then Leather Trousers found himself flung across the bartop, pinned down by a small and ferocious man moving like a tiny, angry tank and dressed as a stripper.

“Motherfucking-cunt-try-that-again-and-I-will-break-both-your-wrists-and-your-fuckbollocksing-legs-and-your-pissbuggery-fucking-jaw-do-you-understand-me-you-fuckturd-prickrotting-arsehole?-Touch-Sherlock-and-I-will- ** _fuck-you-up_**.”

It wasn’t clear how much of that in-a-single-breath threat got through, but Leather Trousers certainly got the gist.

Sherlock prised John off the whimpering remains of the fuckturd and pushed his friend rapidly towards the exit.

Once the fresh air hit John, he staggered a little, giggled, then flung his arms in the air and did a kind of highland pirouette. The hips started off again, almost of their own accord. His feet took him across the footpath with grace and energy. Sherlock didn’t understand how John wasn’t falling on his face, but he not only failed to fall, he stopped to flash his hot dance moves at the appreciative queue and launched into song again.

_Oh, I’m ready for it, come on, bring it  
Oh, I’m ready for it, come on, bring it_

Gay men of all ages looked ready to take John up on the offer, especially when John’s dancing became eighty percent more sinuous. Sherlock was not aware that John could actually move his hips and arse like that. It was distracting.

_So kiss me goodbye, honey I’m gonna make it out alive  
So kiss me goodbye, I can see the venom in your eyes_

This, unfortunately, was when the squad car pulled up and Greg Lestrade emerged. A couple of uniforms hove to nearby.  Greg waved them away from arresting the good doctor for drunk and disorderly.

“Someone spiked his drink,” said Sherlock darkly.

“Doesn’t explain why the two of you are dressed up like the star attraction of a male dance revue.” Sherlock scowled. Greg shook his head. “Yeah, I know. Go in, arrest the bad guy, I know the drill. Is the killer the one who drugged him?”

“No,” said Sherlock, more darkly than ever, “Some moron fancied him and decided this was easier than asking.”

Greg’s eyebrows nearly climbed off his face. Then he watched John singing and dancing to his own private party in the middle of the street and thought:  _Well, I can understand the fancying him part. If that’s the way my flagpole fluttered I’d have a crack._

Greg saw the way Sherlock was glaring at him. “I’d bloody ask him, first,” he protested, knowing it was no earthly good to pretend he hadn’t been thinking what he’d been thinking, “I don’t need to drug people to get a date.”

John overheard the remark and scooted in their direction. “Motherfucking dickwad didn’t fucking ask he just _GRABBED MY COCK_. Jesus fucking _Christ_ on a fucking _bike_.” John leaned against Greg then stood up straight again. “And then the pricktossing fuckbuggery cunt tried to glass Sherlock.”

Greg admired John’s flexible use of the language for a moment, then thought to ask: “What did you do to him, John?”

John grinned like a particularly sly and unrepentant wolf, leaned close and said in much less of a whisper than he thought he was using. “Taught him some fucking manners.”

Sherlock sighed. “He won’t press charges.”

“And why is that?”

“He’s terrified of John.”

“Great. That’s terrific.” Greg glanced at John, but John was already dancing again, arms flung in the air, hips, knees and feet somehow moving under him to keep him grooving his thang while remaining upright.

_So kiss me goodbyyyyyyyyyyyyye  
I can see the venom in your eeeeeeeeeeyyyyees_

Before throwing in, for good measure: “ _Motherfucking Samuel Fucking L Fucking **Jackson**! Yeah_!”

“You’d better get him home,” Greg said.

“I am trying. And talk to the moron with the broken nose. He used something new and it appears to have…” Sherlock and Greg regarded John as he basked in the appreciative whistling of the crowd, waggled his hips and torso a bit more then shouted **_no grabbing the arse! Rude!_** at an enthusiast. “…unusual side effects.”

Then John reeled back towards them, flung his arms around Sherlock’s shoulders, giggling for a moment before sighing deeply. He looked up into Sherlock’s stern and disapproving gaze.

"Fuck it. Fuck. I fucking love you, Sherlock Holmes. You are the best mate I ever had. Best. In. The.  Motherfucking. World. I love you. Seriously. I fucking love you."   
  
Sherlock sighed.

“Seriously, man. I fucking love you. Don’t fancy you. The barman fancied you. So did three of the bouncers. And those two blokes there.” John paused to shout at them over his shoulder “ ** _He’s my date!_** ” then back to Sherlock, “Not me, though. I fancy Mary. Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary.  But I. Fucking. Love. You.” John said, jabbing Sherlock in the chest with an emphatic forefinger on each word and accompanying the declaration with an intense stare.

Sherlock refused to meet Greg’s amused gaze. He sighed again. "I love you too, John," he said in a quelling tone, as a reply seemed obligatory, and of course it was also true.  
  
"No, no, no, no, no..." John’s stare deepened. “I. Fucking. Love. You." More emphatic jabbing, which was likely to leave bruises. John’s legs stopped working for a second, and Sherlock had to wrap his arms firmly around John’s torso to keep him from falling. Actually, Sherlock was tempted to let him drop, but this whole sorry debacle wasn’t really John’s fault.  
  
"I fucking love you too, John,” Sherlock responded solemnly, to John’s satisfaction, “Now get into the taxi. We’re going home."

Greg, grinning, waved them off, to Sherlock’s disgust. “Just arrest the right people, Greg,” he snarled, then slammed the door shut.

John was huddled up against the far door. He seemed to be slightly more coherent, or at least, less in the mood to sing and dance.

“What the …?”  
  
"Someone spiked your drink, John."  
  
"Is that why I feel so horny?”

“I expect so.”

“Fucking hell.”

Silence fell for a time.

“Did we get the bastard?”

“The killer or the creep who drugged you?”

“Killer. I remember the pervert. Broke his nose.” A savage and satisfied grin followed.

Sherlock checked the timely text message.  “Yes, they have him.”

“Good.”

Another long silence, eventually disturbed by John singing softly to himself: “ _I came here to make you dance the night, I don’t care about my guilty pleasure for you….”_ He appeared to be dancing in his seat, performing the ghost of some strange routine with his arms and hands. Sherlock didn’t want to ask.

At Baker Street, Sherlock opened the door of the taxi and John spilled out onto the street before Sherlock had a chance to catch him. John giggled. Then he called the footpath some names that it really had done nothing to deserve. Sherlock paid the driver, pulled John to his feet and then up the stairs to home.

Then he hauled John to the bathroom, sat him on the loo seat and tugged off John’s shoes before undoing and removing his collar. John giggled and pressed his forehead against Sherlock’s ribs. He was murmuring something that turned out to be ‘Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary’, so Sherlock ignored it, turned on the shower and shoved John, fully dressed, under the spray.  
  
John shrieked and found some inventive things to call the showerhead, and then accused it of making him _fucking horny_.  
  
"Can I trust you not to fall over and crack your head open on the tub?" asked Sherlock.

John replied by slipping. Sherlock caught him round the waist, getting thoroughly soaked in cold water at the same time. Carefully, he lowered John to the bottom of the bath. John turned his face up into the flow of cold water, opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue to catch the droplets. Then he said “Fuck” crankily and grabbed his own crotch.

“It’s the chemicals from the date rape drug making you…” Sherlock began to explain helpfully.  
  
"Jesus Christ, yes, fuck it, _get out get out get out_."  
  
Sherlock got out, leaving John to his short term fate. He returned fifteen minutes later to find John sitting, still fully clothed, in the tub, shirt and jeans plastered to his skin and blond hair plastered to his scalp under the still running cold water, fast asleep.

So Sherlock dragged his sleeping friend out of the tub, stripped him to his red underwear, dried him off and shoved him into Sherlock’s own bed to recover while Sherlock changed into pyjamas and robe and decided to spend the night checking on the progress of his latest experiment investigating the effect of household bleach on various organic and inorganic materials.

In the morning, John, despite vivid recollection, claimed to remember nothing of the whole horrible affair. And Sherlock pretended to believe him. Because that’s what friends do.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs John sings and dances to are all by Cobra Starship. In order, they are Church of Hot Addiction, Bring It (Snakes on a Plane) and, in the back of the taxi, Guilty Pleasure.


	10. Shock Treatment: You’ll Hang Your Love from my Branches and Leaves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Violet Morstan Watson never had the most conventional upbringing. And the shock blanket Thing? That began when she was a very tiny baby.

Violet Morstan Watson is growing up loved, if not especially conventionally.

Her mother lives with her best friend and in fact Mary Morstan makes the effort to stay in London for the whole first year of Violet’s life. It’s the longest Mary has spent in one city since she finished university. For most of Violet’s life, Mary and Nirupa (who she considers her Mother and her Other Mother) will be back and forth between the United Kingdom and a vast selection of foreign locales, building bridges and dams and roads and all manner of useful things, engaging with other cultures and communities and generally being explorers and adventurers. Violet won’t always be with them in person, but she will almost never miss a day of speaking with one or both of them.

Violet’s father lives with his best friend, who is a detective. Sherlock and John solve crimes, and John blogs about it. (There’s a running joke about forgetting pants in there, which Violet won’t understand until she’s thirteen years old, and then she’ll fervently wish she didn’t. Dads can be so _embarrassing_.) Violet’s father and her Other Father rarely leave London, though their work sometimes calls them to strange mysteries in foreign cities. Violet will live with them sometimes, visit them often and speak to John almost daily (Sherlock slightly less often, because being a detective means you can’t always come to the phone).

In the first year of Violet’s unconventional upbringing, she sometimes spends the day and night (or longer) at Baker Street with her father, especially if Mary is unwell. (Mary catches a lot of colds and stomach bugs in London – something that never happens to her in Ecuador or Argentina or Ghana). NIrupa nurses Mary back to health, and Violet is whisked away for both her own health and Mary’s stress levels.

It was on the first of these health-related visits that the shock blanket became a Thing.

Violet was asleep in her bassinet. It had taken a while to settle her, and today she was grizzling and fussing from poor sleep and sensitivity to the grizzling and fussing of her ill mother. John sang to her – Sherlock was intrigued to hear that a-cappella versions of _Illuminated_ and _Copper Beaches_ made good substitute lullabies – until she fell into a fitful sleep. The visit hadn’t been planned, and while Mary had expressed enough milk for a few feeds and sent plenty of supplies, John realised that he still needed formula, more nappies, a new baby bottle and temperature gauge, and milk for tea, which he required for survival like certain detectives needed clues.

“She should sleep for a while,” said John, on his way out, “But call me if she wakes and you need me.”

Sherlock, busy with a microscope and slides of dirt, didn’t react and very possibly hadn’t heard. John left anyway, figuring he’d be out for half an hour, max. Hardly time for Sherlock to get into any difficulties with a baby.

John had been gone for less than five minutes when Violet woke up, wet and cranky, and very vocal about it.

Sherlock peered at his slides for half a minute longer, waiting for John to attend to his daughter’s needs, before realising that John was attending to her needs in other ways just now. So he put down the slides, went over to the bassinet and looked down at Violet’s red face, waving fists and generally unhappy demeanour. He didn’t like it when Violet was unhappy. Sherlock’s worldview had recently come to include the standard that Violet should be happy on first principles.

Sherlock proceeded to address this variation from the standard in a methodical fashion.

John returned to Baker Street laden with bags and a desperate desire for tea. He tiptoed up the landing and into the living room, hoping to avoid waking his daughter.  He froze there, partly in surprise but mostly in a kind of fuzz of soul-melting love for everyone in his field of view.

Sherlock Holmes was standing by the desk, an orange shock blanket wrapped cleverly around his bare torso in a makeshift sling. The tiny weight of Violet’s body was a sweet curve in the material, the sling arranged so that she was held close and comfortably next to Sherlock’s chest, near his heart. Sherlock was sorting slides, but when Violet made an agitated sound, he stopped, leaned down and blew a gentle raspberry at her. She gurgled and settled. Sherlock returned to the slides, selected one and inserted it under the microscope.

“Did you get what you needed, John?” he asked in a quiet, regular tone.

“Hmm.” John stepped towards them, glanced at the bassinet, back at Sherlock and the blanket-sling. “What happened to your shirt?”

“I miscalculated when I changed her nappy. I picked her up after removing the soiled one and cleaning her up…”

“That was asking for trouble.”

“She was cold and starting to cry. I’ve noticed she cries less when she’s held for a while.”

“Right.”

“And then she peed on me.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It wasn’t on purpose, John. She’s an infant. An infant who contains rather more urine than I’d expected, but…”

John tried not to laugh, but then figured what the hell, and laughed.

“By the time I’d taken the shirt off, cleaned her up again and put a new nappy on her, she was crying again. I tried a few things, but she seemed to like being held. This seemed a good solution. I can work, she can settle and get some sleep, everyone gets what they want. What?”

“Nothing.

John peered into the folds of the blanket. Violet was carefully placed so that she could breathe easily but be held close. Her little cheek was pressed to Sherlock’s chest, where no doubt the thud of his heart was steady and comforting. Violet gave a little sigh, shifted slightly and waved her arms. Sherlock bent to see that she was still comfortable, and Violet whacked him in the chin and then opened her fist and took hold of the end of Sherlock’s nose.

With her little nails digging into his skin, Sherlock held perfectly still. He sighed. He said: “Violet, I’m still testing the chemical reactions of the soil samples, so I would appreciate having my face back.” Violet gurgled some more. “It’s actually quite important, Violet. If the right soil sample shows signs of both paint thinner and talcum powder, we catch an attempted murderer before they turn into an actual murderer.”

Violet sighed again, released Sherlock’s nose, and turned, snuggling against him. Sherlock’s arm curled underneath her for extra stability and then bent over the microscope.

“There, that’s the one,” Sherlock said to Violet (John noted that the comment was definitely not aimed at him).

“Do you want me to take her?” John offered.

“No. She’s sleeping now. Best to leave her.”

“Yes,” John agreed gently, “It is. Tea?”

“Good. Yes. Phone, John. It’s in my pocket.” The one he couldn’t reach because that arm was full of sleeping baby. John fetched the phone, without complaint, and made tea while Sherlock texted Greg Lestrade with the solution to the case.

Sherlock eventually taught John how to arrange and fasten the shock blanket sling, and Violet spent more hours in it than in her bassinet while at Baker Street. Later, other babies were rocked to sleep in the same way. Ford. The twins. Chloe. Even Nicola, once.

Many years later, the orange blanket was passed on to new parents, who cradled their baby Holmes-Watson as closely and as often as they themselves had been held, crooning the same songs.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is a lyric from Angie Hart's 'Asleep'.


	11. There’s a Hole Where Something Was

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the last year, Sherlock and the teenaged Violet have become estranged. When John is injured on a case and is rushed into surgery, they deal with their issues in the hospital waiting room.

 

Sherlock was only aware of Violet’s presence when she stood directly in front of him, grabbed him by his unbandaged wrist to stop his uneven pacing, peered into his troubled grey eyes and snapped: “Sherlock!”

He blinked, saw her, winced. She was in her school uniform. His brain did that thing it did – that had failed him today – and knew immediately that she had eaten a tuna sandwich for lunch, played hockey in the morning, argued with a friend, delivered a presentation to one of her classes – most likely biology – and was thinking of dropping history next semester, probably in favour of another language option to go with Spanish and Mandarin.

Of course Mycroft had sent a car to the school for her to come straight to hospital. Doubtless a message was on its way to Mary, a month into a new building project in southern Chile. Another bridge, Sherlock thought, but he hadn’t been that interested so he couldn’t remember the details of the project. He didn’t know and couldn’t find it in him to care. Bridges were nothing. Bridges were pointless. So many things were pointless…

“Sherlock!”

Sherlock blinked again. Saw Violet, still there, still staring. He drew a breath, startled at the realisation that it had been a little while between inhalations.

“He’s in surgery,” said Sherlock, “He’ll be fine.”

Violet nodded. “That’s what Mycroft said.” She patted Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock’s other hand dropped, the one he’d sprained and was now firmly bandaged. His fingers, poking out from the linen wrappings, rested uncertainly over hers on his bare wrist. Violet had not touched his hand in a long time. Not hugged him. Not… she wasn’t a little girl any more. Fifteen, and moody, and resentful sometimes. He understood. He knew why. He hadn’t told her he knew, of course. He’d learned, finally, that almost nobody liked him saying everything he could read of them. Even John, who found it amusing most of the time, would still sometimes beg him to _shut the fuck up. I know, I don’t need to know you know, you twat. Can’t you just leave it be?_

“Sherlock, breathe…”

“I missed it. There’s always something. I should have realised sooner. John shouldn’t have been there.”

“As if you’ve ever been able to stop him,” said Violet.

“I can. Stop him. When I need to. I should have known there was a third thief. I missed… I missed… a little thing. Little. Too big. He…”

“Breathe.”

Her hand was on his chest now, and his chest ached, because he used to hold her there, against his chest, when she was a baby, and breathe into her face when she grizzled, and she’d wave her little fists around, smacking him in the chin sometimes, and he didn’t mind, he never minded, when he held her, because she was Violet.  John’s Violet.

John.

“Sherlock, really, you need to keep breathing. He’s going to be all right. Mycroft said so. A broken arm, a shallow stab wound…” her voice faltered and strengthened again, “He’s going to be fine.”

Sherlock nodded, because, obviously, yes, John would be fine, for all it had looked like his neck would be broken in the fall. John had been conscious and talking all the way to the hospital in the ambulance, in pain but also irritated that he’d been caught on the back foot. _Good god, stabbed by some kid and thrown down the stairs like an amateur, things could have been much worse, it was hardly a scratch,_ _get that look off your face, you great pillock_.

John laughing and grimacing at the fact that Sherlock had intercepted this vicious kid by jumping off the first floor landing right on top of the little bastard, breaking said little bastard’s leg in the process. The fact that Sherlock was only mildly injured – a sprained wrist, a grazed leg – was really _, just typical of you, you berk, always jumping off things practically unscathed…_

…and they’d looked at each other, and John had patted Sherlock’s hand, like Sherlock was the one who needed succour.

Minor injuries, the medical staff said, but surgery was necessary. They’d taken John away. Sherlock had texted Mycroft to let Mary and Violet know.

And here was Violet, fifteen years old, in her school uniform, looking so grown up, being so grown up, too grown up to hug him any more, too grown up to be comfortable with her father’s strange best friend, too…

“Yes, he’ll be fine,” said Sherlock at last, and Violet looked a little confused, because it had been a good long stretch of quiet between her reassurance and this response.

Sherlock looked at Violet’s hand, still on his chest. Her other was wrapped around his wrist. 

“You got him, though, didn’t you?” she said, “The bastard who hurt him?”

“Yes. I broke his leg. Gave him a concussion.”

“Good. I’ve always known what you’d do to anyone who hurt Dad. Or what he’d do to anyone who hurt you.”

“Would do. Have done.” Sherlock knew that maybe that wasn’t a good thing for a fifteen year old to know about her father’s best friend, or her father. “For you too,” he said, though that possibly was also not a good thing to tell her.

“I know.” Violet smiled. She was like her father, like that. Smiling in the face of things that other people didn’t think should be funny.

Violet’s grip on his wrist relaxed and she ran her fingers over his hand, as though she was trying to wrap their fingers together. He stared, but didn’t move. He didn’t _want_ to want her to hug him the way she used to. He didn’t want to miss the way it used to be, before high school, before societal convention made him strange to her. He didn’t want to long for the time when she was five years old and held his hand all the time. Useless sentiment.

He swallowed. John was in surgery and he would be fine and everything would be fine.

 “Sherlock… it’s not your fault.”

“I should have known.”

“Well, you don’t know everything.”

His silence managed to be vaguely offended at the accusation, and it made her laugh.  The sound startled him. He hadn’t heard it in a while. It startled him even more when she stood on her tiptoes to lean up and kiss him on the cheek. The spot on his face tingled, warm, remembering the years of childish wet kisses she’d planted on his face, even when he had very distinctly not been in the mood for it.

“Teenagers are awful,” said Violet suddenly, “I should know, being one. Maybe you can’t remember back that far.” That was accompanied by a cheeky smirk, very reminiscent of Mary.

Sherlock frowned. “I remember. I was terrible. I’m sure Mycroft can give you the details.”

“I’ll ask him sometime.”

“He probably has incriminating footage somewhere.”

“That should be good for a laugh next Christmas.”

“No doubt.” Sherlock’s tone was distant. He didn’t understand this conversation.

“When I started at my new school last year, I found it… a bit awkward,” said Violet thoughtfully, “Trying to explain about my parents. All four of you.”

Sherlock knew this. He knew that Violet had withdrawn from him because she couldn’t explain him satisfactorily to her peers.

_This is my father, this is my father’s best friend, who is like a second father to me, no they’re not lovers, they’re not gay, they’re just, yeah it’s weird, people aren’t friends like that, well except my Mum and Nirupa, who are, no, they’re not a couple either, it’s just I have parents who are kind of life partners with people they don’t sleep with, that’s not weird, why would you think that was weird, okay, yes, it’s not conventional, okay, yes, weird._

Peer pressure is hell, especially when you’re a teenager, especially trying to fit in to a new school. Sherlock understood why Violet didn’t hug him any more, hardly smiled at him now, often pretended she didn’t really know him, and he let her withdraw. He still loved her, Violet, John’s Violet, his Violet. He didn’t want to embarrass her. He didn’t want her to be uncomfortable because of him. So she withdrew, and so did he, and now her hands were on his wrist and his heart, she was touching him for the first time in eight months.

“You know why, don’t you?” said Violet warily.

Sherlock didn’t pretend to not understand. He had always been honest with the children, even when it wasn’t necessarily appropriate.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a perfectly understandable response,” he said stiffly.

“No, it’s a perfectly obnoxious one,” said Violet. She paused, and then said: “I was at Greg and Molly’s place last month, and you should have seen Chris and David.” The Lestrades’ two eldest children, twin boys. “They sprawl all over each other, the way you and Dad do. I mean, you don’t usually seem to like being touched much, by other adults I mean. You hugged us all the time as kids, but you didn’t seem to like grown-ups getting too close. But you and Dad were always sticking your feet all over each other on the sofa, or nicking stuff the other one was using, or wrestling over the sheet music Dad was always trying to hide from you and you were always pinching to look at before it was ready. You were like Chris and David, just… all over each other. Brothers do that, apparently.”

“Mycroft and I didn’t.”

“Well, other kinds of brothers do. And I realised after that how stupid I was. I mean, it doesn’t really matter what the kids at school think, does it? If they’re too conventional to understand. You’re just like brothers. And Mum and Nirupa are like sisters. Ones that get along, I mean.” Violet grinned.

“Yes,” said Sherlock after a moment, when a reply seemed expected.

“So. I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid and all caught up in what those idiots at school think. I’m sorry I stopped hugging you. I’m sorry I stopped telling you I love you.”

Sherlock thought for a moment. “That’s all right,” he said, “You’re a teenager. Terrible. You’ve admitted it.”

“I’m going to hug you now, Sherlock,” Violet told him sternly, “And you’re going to let me, even though you don’t usually hug grown-ups. You’re my other dad, and I love you, and it’s allowed.”

 _So you’re a grown-up now?_ was on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t voice it, because Violet, John’s Violet, his Violet, slid her arms around him and laid her head against his chest, where her hand had been, and his own arms wrapped around her shoulders and held her close and oh, he’d missed this, he’d missed their Violet.

They held each other, almost-father and not-quite-daughter and he listened to her breathing and the rate of her heart and…

… and he knew things. He knew how afraid she was, and how brave she was trying to be, for him, and that was ridiculous, that was unnecessary, that was the wrong way around, because she was fifteen and he was supposed to be the adult here.

He kissed the top of her head, the way he used to, and tightened his arms around her. “John will be fine,” he told her, confidently.

“Course he will,” she said, her voice muffled against his shirt, but he could hear the shake in it. “You wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”

“No,” he agreed, “I wouldn’t.”

Violet squeezed his ribs, hard, and burrowed into his embrace, like she was five years old again, and wanted him to chase away a bad dream. Sherlock held her hard, even though it made his wrist ache.

“Sherlock?” Her voice was small.

“Hmm?” He was breathing in the scent of her hair, noting the change of brand, the faint lingering aroma of the school cafeteria, second hand cigarette smoke, a schoolmate’s excessive perfume. The underlying scent of Violet, hers since she was a child.

“Would you… There’s this thing you used to do, when I was little. It’s dumb. It’s really stupid.” She began to shake her head, embarrassed.

“Nothing you want is dumb, Violet.” Sherlock rested his cheek against her hair and thought: _it will be easily to find an orange shock blanket here, if that’s what she wants. I’ll steal one for her.  I’ll steal a dozen. She can have a hundred, if she wants them._

“This is. I mean. When I was really, really small and I got upset you…” She hid her face against his shirt. “You did this thing where you… no, this is really stupid.”

Not a shock blanket. And then he knew. He could hardly credit she would remember, but then, he’d kept it up until she was four years old, because it made her laugh.

So Sherlock pulled back a little, bent his face to hers where others couldn’t see, and blew a gentle breath through pursed lips at her.

Violet clung to him. Swallowed a sob.

He blew at her again. _Cow whispering,_ John called it.

The sob choked away. Violet giggled.

He blew a third time, and Violet clung to him still, but only because she was laughing so hard.

“That’s the dumbest thing,” she giggled, clutching his shirt.

“It isn’t _dumb_ ,” he said, “I once stopped a stampeding cow with that technique.”

“Of course you did.”

“Your father was very relieved, as it meant he didn’t have to attempt to wrangle it before it trampled someone to death.”

“Bet he could have, though. Wrangled it.”

“He certainly would have tried.”

“Does that make him brave or an idiot?”

“It makes him John,” said Sherlock simply, because John was brave and an idiot and a hundred things besides.

Violet, grinning, pulled away a little, but kept his hand in hers. She had recovered her equilibrium.

“He’s going to be okay,” she told Sherlock confidently.

“Yes.”

But she gave him a sceptical look, and then a mischievous one, and she stood on tiptoes, tilting her face as though for a kiss, and then blew a noisy, happy raspberry in his face.

Sherlock blinked, then laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Works, though,” she said.

“Years of scientific application prove it,” he agreed.

“Raspberries for science!” said Violet, and giggled some more.

“The official term is ‘cow whispering’.”

Violet threaded her arm through his and they sat together on the uncomfortable plastic chairs and, while they waited for John to come out of surgery, they talked the absence of the last eight months to dust.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is a line from Fall Out Boy's 'Disloyal Order of Buffaloes'.


	12. Look out world (I’m about to be bad)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and 15-year-old Violet have reconnected in a hospital waiting room while John is in surgery, following a case gone wrong. John's fine, but he and Sherlock are going to have Words about their future. His recovery also doesn't mean that Violet Morstan Watson isn't up for a little creative revenge on the bastard who hurt her dad.

John was wheeled out from surgery and, just as the doctors had predicted, he was fine. Even with the stitches in his gut to seal up the shallow knife wound, and even with the metal plates screwed to his radius and ulna so the broken bones would mend straight, he was fine.

He was aware that his best friend and his daughter were there when he came around the third and fourth times – anaesthetic had that effect, and he’d wake up and fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep mid-sentence – and at other times after that, until finally he woke up properly and there they still were.

There was something different about them, John could tell, even while he was still a bit groggy. They seemed more relaxed – well, apart from the residual tension about _him_ – and Violet was smiling at Sherlock and patting his hand, and Sherlock looked like he was blooming every time Violet touched his hand or leaned against his arm, and god that was good to see, because the last year had been very weird between them.

“Hey,” said John, when he could get his mouth to work. He’d intended to say something more coherent, but that seemed to be enough for starters.

“Hey yourself,” said Violet, kissing his forehead.

“Try not to let the suspect throw you down the stairs next time,” said Sherlock sternly, cutting to the chase as always.

A more coherent response sprang up immediately, from force of habit. “I’ll make every effort not to get pitched down stairs, provided you try not to be in the way when the little pricks lunge at you with knives.” John poked Sherlock in the belly with a jabby forefinger.

Sherlock considered. “All right.” He poked John in the arch of his foot, making John twitch away.

“Ow. Get off.”

Sherlock grabbed hold of John’s foot. “Stop moving. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I fell down a _staircase_ , Sherlock.” John wriggled his foot, wincing as he tried to extract the extremity.

“My point exactly.” Sherlock released the foot.

“Fix up my pillow, you plonker.”

Sherlock obediently wrested John’s pillow up from where it had slithered away during the tussle, supported John’s back while he returned it to a more useful position, and adjusted a second pillow under John’s broken arm for extra support.

John sighed and relaxed. “I’d kill for a cup of tea.”

“I’m sure murder won’t be necessary.”

“Does that mean you’ll make it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s what the café is for.”

“Hospital tea. You actually want me to die, don’t you?”

Violet snorted a very unladylike snort of satisfaction. “Honestly. You two. You’re like a pair of lolloping teenagers. You do remember you’re middle aged men, don’t you? At least some of the time?”

John grinned. Sherlock grinned back at him.

“God. My dads. You are both idiots,” said Violet, rolling her eyes at the pair of them, and it only made John and Sherlock’s grins widen.

“Guess what,” said Violet, her eyes lighting up, “Uncle Greg came by and he told me that idiot thief is on the next floor down, with a police guard, with his leg in a plaster cast.”

John, who was bandaged and stitched but not cast in plaster, was very satisfied with this. Casts were heavy, cumbersome and itchy. Sherlock expressed the regret that he hadn’t managed to break both the little prick’s legs, but you couldn’t have everything in life.

“I have to nip out for a minute,” said Violet, “I’ll be right back.”

Out she nipped, and was gone for almost three quarters of an hour: time that John and Sherlock spent arguing.

“You are not giving up consultancy because I was clumsy,” John snapped at one point.

“We’re getting on, John, we can’t keep doing this.”

“You mean _I’m_ getting too old, and so help me, if you say it again, I will kick your arse from here to the Isle of Man and back again. We had one bad day. _One_. And I’m fine. We don’t usually get ourselves in this kind of fix anymore anyway.  One or two hospital visits a year, usually minor, it’s nothing.”

“Next time, we might not be so lucky. John, you’re fifty eight…”

“I’m slowing down, yes, I know, Sherlock. I’m not the man I was…”

“I didn’t say…”

“Isle of Man, Sherlock. My boot. Your arse. I am not kidding.”

“All I’m suggesting is that we be more selective about the cases we choose. I’m fifty four myself. This jumping off landings to break suspects’ legs is not exactly good for me either.” He waved his bandaged wrist in the air, pointed at the grazed leg on which he’d been limping, “One day I’m going to jump off something and not be ‘practically unscathed’.”

John bit down on a response to that because, well, it was what terrified him. He still had nightmares about it sometimes, about St Bart’s. Still.

“Fine. Except we never know which cases are the running-around-jumping-off-things cases until we’re actually on them.”

“We just have to change our tactics,” said Sherlock.

John’s eyes narrowed at that, then became speculative. “More guerrilla warfare, less frontal assault? More stealth and stalking, less…”

“Getting stabbed and thrown down stairs and then leaping off first floor landings like maniacs. Yes.”

John considered. “Seems doable.”

“Right.”

At which point, Violet made her return, in the company of her Uncle Greg. She looked mutinous. Greg looked angry. Or possibly very amused, but trying to hide it under anger.

On seeing John and Sherlock, Violet’s mutinous expression changed to one of guilty triumph.

John was instantly on guard. “What have you done, Violet?”

“Me? Nothing. I haven ‘t done anything. Have I, Uncle Greg?”

Greg Lestrade sighed and deposited Violet, whom he held by her upper arm, in a chair beside John’s bed.

“You have left a patient – a police prisoner – in hysterics and having his broken leg recast. That isn’t precisely ‘nothing’, Violet.”

“Serves him right,” snarled Violet, “He hurt my Dad. And anyway. I didn’t actually _do_ anything.”

Greg sighed. John facepalmed, because he knew that Violet not doing anything was anyone else’s doing quite a lot. Sherlock leaned towards her, all eager attention, because, yes, _exactly_ , Violet’s _precisely nothing_ was always inventive.

“Go on,” said John sternly, “Spill. This nothing that you did. What was it?”

“You know how I said the moron who stabbed you was downstairs?”

Greg groaned, because he knew that this bit, _this,_ it was _his_ fault.

“So I went downstairs and saw the constable was on a loo break, so I told the nurse on duty that I was the patient’s little sister and I needed to see him.”

“Did you cry?” Sherlock asked, keen for details.

“Like a baby,” Violet told him warmly, “You would have thought we meant the world to each other.”

Sherlock nodded approvingly, then was abruptly still because John and Greg were both giving him that ‘not good’ look.

“I went in and the jerk was sort of asleep. So I…” Violet gave Greg a defiant look. “So I got my nail scissors and cut off a bit of my hair; and I got a straw from the cup next to his bed and I…”

Sherlock’s face had lit up like a Christmas tree in anticipation, because while not absolutely certain what was coming next, he knew it was going to be a corker.

“I snuck up and blew the hairs down the top of his cast with the straw.”

“And…?” John was caught up despite himself.

“He woke up, and I told him I’d just seen a bloody great spider crawl down his cast.”

It was at this point that the amusement won the war against anger on Greg Lestrade’ face. “He was screaming like a banshee that he could _feel the spider_ in there when the nurses showed up, and there _she_ was,” he nodded at Violet, “All butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, saying she had no idea what the problem was. I got her out of there, quick smart, before the constable showed up again.”

“But he was shrieking so much that they’ve taken him to have the cast cut off and redone so that he can see there really isn’t a spider.”

John sighed. “You’ve made extra work for the staff, you know.”

“I know,” said Violet, unrepentant, “But they don’t like him either. He kept swearing at the nurses and being a little shit, so I don’t think they’re exactly _hurrying_ with him.”

John stared at her a little longer, then at Greg and Sherlock. “I’ve spawned a demon child,” he said, and they could tell he was torn between pride and horror.

“That’ll teach him to mess with my dads,” said Violet darkly.

“That’s my girl,” said Sherlock, dropping an approving kiss onto the top of her head.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from the song 'Bad' by Kirsty McColl


	13. It’s You and Me, It’s Here and Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sherlock first returned home to Baker Street, he suffered nightmares, and John's insomnia didn't go away. That's when it began. This thing they do that nobody knows about. (Well, one person does, but she'll never breathe a word.)

People who think Sherlock and John sleep together are both more right and more wrong than they know.

Here is something the boys of Baker Street have never told a soul. Mrs Hudson guessed, but she understood the heart of it. She knows there’s more than one kind of love that’s deep and abiding and even physical that isn’t about sexual desire.

For Sherlock’s first three weeks back home after his year Away, his Year in Hell, Sherlock and John shared a bed most nights. When they couldn’t sleep, they shared their insomnia in the living room.

It began that very first night, when they fell asleep on the floor, after Sherlock had finally given in to the emotional strain and collapsed in John’s arms. In the middle of the night, they awoke, stiff and aching and unable to leave each other’s sight. John helped Sherlock to his room and found he couldn’t go out again. Sherlock didn’t want him to. So they lay together on the bed and when sleep wouldn’t come, John sang the Scottish lullaby until it did.

They both slept for the rest of the night, the first solid rest either of them had had since Sherlock stepped off the roof of St Bart’s.

The night after that was less peaceful. John’s insomnia didn’t suddenly vanish, and he’d become prone to nightmares again. It surprised him not at all that Sherlock had developed his own pantheon of evil dreams that rattled him regularly to wakefulness.

On that second night, Sherlock stumbled out of his room to the kitchen in pyjama bottoms but shirtless, limping still, the bruises and scars and still healing wounds on his chest, arms and back startlingly visible. His hand shook as he poured a glass of water from the tap, and he scowled at the hand as though it betrayed him.

A soft cough made him drop the glass, which shattered in the sink, and he whirled, dropping to a fighting stance for a moment before he saw John sitting on the sofa, his untouched guitar flat across his lap. A notebook and a pen were resting on top of it.

“Sorry,” said John, “I couldn’t sleep.”

Sherlock closed his trembling hand in a fist. Swallowed. Swallowed again. Clenched his jaw.

“Sherlock, don’t,” said John gently, “I’m the last person in the world you need to hide things from, or explain things to.  I’m no stranger to PTSD. ”

The old Sherlock would have denied it. He would have drawn himself up and declared haughtily that he was perfectly fine and that John was an idiot, and ruthlessly suppressed the rush of anxiety and the betrayal of his palpitating heart. He would have locked his perceived weakness away and pretended so hard that it didn’t exist that eventually he would believe it.

But this was Sherlock-now, dismantled and remade by loss and love, by the ferocious will to protect all that he loved; and by John. All he did, then, was nod. He poured a fresh glass of water and joined John on the sofa. He jammed himself up at one end, his arms and legs pulled tightly against his body, making his lanky body a small, small target, and sipped cautiously at the water.

John watched him for a moment before moving the notebook and pen, and lifting his guitar properly into position. He strummed idly, a few chords.

“I wasn’t going to play, before. Didn’t want to wake you. I was just… thinking.” These days he found it easier to be sleepless with a guitar in his hands, even if he didn’t play. When it wasn’t a conduit for his thoughts and feelings, it was at least a shield.

Sherlock ‘hmmed’ a minimal response.

John played a few notes; a few more. Picked out a melody. Sherlock closed his eyes. Finally, he unfurled enough to stretch his legs a little. As John played the familiar tune, Sherlock dared to tuck his feet under John’s thigh. John affected not to notice and continued to play _This Ghost_ to the end. Then he dropped a hand to Sherlock’s ankle, squeezed it first then patted it. Sherlock’s feet burrowed further under John’s leg. John played _Illuminated_ , fingers moving nimbly across the strings, the guitar singing although John didn’t.

Eventually, John stopped playing and Sherlock said he should probably go back to bed. He limped to the kitchen, only to find John following him.

John, looking awkward, said: “Do you mind if I…?” and nodded towards the bedroom.

Sherlock studied him, his take-no-prisoners scrutiny of old, and John let him read whatever he would. A moment later, Sherlock replied. “Not at all. In fact…” He drew a breath on the next thought. Held it.

John nodded, understanding without the words.

In Sherlock’s bedroom, Sherlock crawled under the covers on the right side of the bed. John propped his guitar against the wall and slid under the quilt only, back against the headboard, on the left.

“Not sleeping?” Sherlock asked.

“Not yet,” John said, “Don’t worry. I’ll keep watch for a while.”

And knowing that John had his back, Sherlock slept. He dreamed again – pursuit, blood, falling, failure, blades and teeth – but a hand was on his shoulder as he sat, bolt upright, panting, and a voice he trusted with his life said: “It’s all right Sherlock. It’s over. You’re home.”

The next night, John didn’t ask. He simply retired with Sherlock, got into the left side of the bed, and kept watch until Sherlock slept. John was still there when the nightmares woke him. John had nightmares of his own, of course. Mostly he didn’t sleep. It was like their earliest days, reversed, with Sherlock wracked in PTSD nightmares and John sleepless with overactive thought. John would play guitar (either from the sofa or right beside him on the bed) to soothe nerves back to sleep, the way Sherlock used to play his violin for John.

They knew without discussing it what was going on, and why they needed it.  They needed to go to sleep knowing the other was safe; needed to feel safe themselves in order to sleep. They needed to wake up knowing the other was really, actually and truly there. So they didn’t talk about it. They just gave each other what they needed.

On the eighth night, Sherlock woke from a nightmare and John was there, lying beside him, his voice soothing, a hand on his arm. “Sherlock, you’re home. It’s Baker Street. Everything’s all right.”

Sherlock lay on his back, catching his breath as though he had been running through the streets of Warsaw, hell on his heels, which hadn’t been far from the truth. It had ended at the railyards. It had ended in blood and bone and guts under the crushing tonnes of a moving carriage, a human body deliberately reduced to offal and meat. Not Sherlock’s original plan, no, but a plan he had desperately thrown together because failure would mean exposure, and exposure would mean losing everything. Losing everyone. Sebastian Moran would make sure of it, if he knew, and so Sherlock did awful things to murderous people, to make sure Moran would never know. At least, until he was able to kill Moran, another plan of desperation when Sherlock was a half dozen breaths away from death himself.

Sherlock blinked sweat from his eyes in the dark. John hadn’t asked him about that year. Hadn’t pushed or pried. Only waited.  Of course, John already guessed what had happened to Sherlock, and the things he’d done. John wasn’t stupid.

“John,” he said.

“Right here, Sherlock.” Obviously, but the sound of his voice, so close to Sherlock’s ear, was reassuring anyway.

Sherlock was not used to needing things he didn’t understand. He needed John to know what he was thinking, but he wasn’t sure why. Did he need John to know and … not mind? Absolve him? Judge him? Sherlock couldn’t tell which, only that he needed John to know.

“I don’t regret the things I did,” he said, matter-of-fact and low, “They were necessary. But…” Unexpectedly, his voice shrank, “Terrible.”

John turned onto his side and rested a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. He moved his hand down Sherlock’s sweat-damped skin, tracing scars and still-healing wounds, fingers light over deep bruises and cracked ribs, to come to rest at last over Sherlock’s racing heart.

“And terrible things were done to you,” said John.

A sharp breath and silence. A knot that Sherlock didn’t know was there uncoiled slightly. Of course John understood.  John had shot a killer to save him, when they hardly knew each other.

“I know war, Sherlock. I know what it does to people.” His hand stroked the battered skin.

“I killed people.”

“Yes.”

“It was necessary.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“I… did not enjoy killing people, John. Even when it was necessary. Even when they deserved it. I tell myself it doesn’t matter; that the world is better without them. Safer. You, Lestrade, Mrs Hudson, are safer. It is ridiculous that I feel… this. Whatever this is. Ridding the world of those people was not a bad thing.”

“No.”

“I didn’t like it. Killing is ugly. It’s brutal. There’s no... _finesse_ in it. But it was me or them. Or it was _you_ or them. I chose you.”

“It’s good that you don’t like it,” John said, “That’s human and sane.”

“You don’t like it either.”

“No.”

“I don’t even dream about them. Not precisely.”

“What do you dream?”

It was so easy to talk about this in the dark, but even so, Sherlock closed his eyes. Breathed a few deep breaths. Dreams of death. His own. Mrs Hudson. Greg Lestrade. Molly and Mycroft, sometimes even Angelo or people from the homeless network or even, good lord, Tad Anderson. John, of course. Mostly John.

“Failing,” he said at last.

“You didn’t fail,” said John. His hand, which had been motionless on Sherlock’s skin, flexed slightly. “You beat them. You won.”

“It was a near thing, at times.”

“And yet, here you are.”

“Yes. Here I am.” Sherlock sighed. “I don’t want to waste any more energy on them.  When I could, I arranged for arrests, or for them to turn on each other. When I couldn’t… I did what I had to do to survive, and to protect all of you.”

“That,” said John quietly, “Seems like a soldier’s philosophy.”

“Your philosophy.”

John considered this quietly in the dark. “Yes,” he said, “It’s the philosophy of last resort, but sometimes that’s all we have. Given the choice between that cabbie and you, I chose you. I never regretted a second of that choice. I’d choose you again in a heartbeat. I always do.”

Sherlock raised a hand and placed it over John’s, still resting on his chest. “And I choose you. Every time. In a heartbeat.” The rest of the knot in his gut uncoiled.

Sherlock felt slight pressure on his skin as John shifted, leaned up and over and pressed his forehead briefly to Sherlock’s. Then he shifted, and pressed cool, dry lips to Sherlock’s temple before rolling back to his side of the bed. His hand was now in Sherlock’s, resting on Sherlock’s chest.

“I can play for you, if you like,” he said, squeezing the hand briefly.

“Thank you. Yes.” Sherlock released John’s hand. John brought his guitar into his lap and, in the dark, he played the melodies of _Illuminated_ and _Believe_ and something Sherlock hadn’t heard before.

“That’s new,” he murmured.

“Not finished yet,” said John, “I don’t know if I will. I can’t seem to find the right words. Just a line or two so far, a chorus probably. Maybe I won’t finish it.”

“What are the lines?”

John stopped playing to look at Sherlock, then shrugged and sang.

 _Take another look, take a look around_  
It’s you and me, it’s here and now  
As you sparkle in the sky I’ll catch you while I can  
‘Cause all we are is all I am.  
I just want you to see what I’ve always believed  
You are the miracle in me.

 He stopped playing. “I can’t seem to think of a verse to go with it.”

Sherlock had nothing to say. He was remembering John at the graveyard, the one dangerous induglence he’d allowed himself before disappearing. He’d confessed it to John, who had seemed torn between yelling and crying for a moment before taking a third path, and laughing at him. “You sentimental bastard,” he’d said affectionately, and then made tea.

John, in the uncanny way he sometimes had, appeared to know what Sherlock was thinking. He smiled as he put the guitar down. “I got my miracle,” he said, with a certain smugness, “I knew you’d deliver. You demented genius.”

“You worked it out.”

“No. I guessed and took a wild stab in the dark.”

“Which is more than Mycroft did.”

“So it is.” John grinned, then patted Sherlock’s arm. “Try to get some sleep, Miracle Man. I’ll keep watch for a bit.”

And Sherlock slept.

The nightmares didn’t stop, of course. No more than John’s had, to begin with. But they became less violent, less frequent. Some nights, neither of them could sleep, and they’d gather in the living room, violin and guitar filling in the companionable silence with companionable sound.  During the day, Sherlock hovered near John, or John near Sherlock, and Mrs Hudson made absolutely no observations on this new habit, but brought scones and cakes and limitless, unjudging affection.

Slowly, John and Sherlock’s anxious undercurrents accepted that it was over, that they were home, alive and safe.

Three weeks. By the end of them, Sherlock was healthier, more settled. He joined John at rehearsals with the band. John sang his dreadful and impossibly cheerful song for him, calling attention to the light he found in Sherlock while being light himself. Greg and Molly and even the insufferable Anderson welcomed him home, anchored him more solidly into his life again. Sherlock decided to play with Collared.  He took on a case. His life became his own once more.

One night, not long after the first band rehearsal, John fell asleep on the sofa, and Sherlock slept in his own bed, a whole night, without waking in panic. Within a few days they drifted back to their own rooms, able to do so calm in the knowledge that yes, really, actually, truly, Sherlock was home and everyone was safe and everything was all right.

But here is something else the boys of Baker Street have never told a soul.

For the rest of their lives, through crime-solving, Mary Morstan, children visiting and living with them, and retirement to a bee farm in Sussex: from time to time, they share a bed.

Sometimes it’s for cases, or at least because there’s only one room left at the hotel or B&B while they are chasing down a miscreant outside London.

Sometimes it’s simply because it’s a bad night, because dreams like those never  go away forever, and John wakes to visions of so much blood under a blazing Afghan sky or a tall man falling falling falling like a raven with broken wings; or Sherlock jerks awake, feet twitching like he’s still running, too late to save someone, or too slow to escape the abyss at his heels, or his body flinches, feeling the knives and the crack of bone, and soaking in blood (his own and others) and more and worse.

If one can’t sleep, he keeps watch over the other. If there are nightmares, one will play music for the other. When the night is unbearable, they help each other bear it.

People have no idea that they do this, but anyone can see, whether they like the men of Baker Street or not: those men love each other, down to the marrow.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Shinedown's Miracle - [ listen to it on YouTube](http://youtu.be/ywegLjWt5i4)
> 
> And in the meantime, in an alternate Alternate Universe, a John and Sherlock who are very like (but not quite the same as) this John and Sherlock experience a different epiphany. 
> 
> Read the first of The Gladstone Variations, a slash AU of this AU: [All We Are Is All I Am.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/539374)


	14. Undress Your Colours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do Sherlock and John's children get up to when left nominally unsupervised for an hour? Shenanigans, that's what. (And does Mrs Hudson care? Answer: as long as nobody's setting fire to things or exploding kitchen appliances, no she does not.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's title comes from the Shinedown song, Amaryllis.
> 
> This fic is my (non-porny) contribution to Red Pants Monday.

Sherrinford Holmes seems a quiet boy. He has a tendency to watch the world with big eyes, and his brain is usually feverishly busy. When he speaks, he can come out with the oddest pronouncements because he forgets to fill in the intervening steps that led from the observation to voicing the thought. He sees and thinks a whole lot more than he ever says. But on the whole, he seems a quiet lad.

Left to his own devices, Ford can find trouble enough. He once went missing for six hours at the old family home, only to be discovered sitting cross-legged in the henhouse behind the kitchen, studying the behaviour of bantam hens. He was five years old, and he had made eight pages of notes. (He was able to identify individual chickens from the kitchen window for the next few years, until old age – or more likely the cook’s chopper – got to them.)

For all that he thinks fast, notices everything and sometimes gets lost in his investigations of the world, Ford is not considered a troublemaker.

Violet Morstan Watson, on the other hand, is. Oh yes. She has an adventurous spirit, an unquenchable curiosity and a handy lack of concern for societal expectations. Let’s face it, not only does she spend a lot of her life getting conflicting data about expectations, living as she often does in vastly different societies and cultures, there are her four parents who don’t really give many damns about the expectations of the society they primarily come from.

All of this means that when Violet and Ford get into trouble, Violet almost always gets the blame for leading Ford astray.

Between them, Ford and Violet have six parents, and given that at least three of them are geniuses, it takes a while for five of the six collective parents to realise that at least half of the ideas for the mischief they get up to are Ford’s. Ford, on his own, is rarely in trouble. Five of the six haven’t realised that normally, when Ford thinks of these things, he doesn’t bother to follow through. Mischief is not really fun unless Violet’s there to make trouble with him. Mischief shared, Ford decided long ago, is fun cubed.

(The parent who knows exactly how responsible Ford is for these shenanigans? That would be John Watson. John is something of a sly, quiet troublemaker himself from time to time, and recognises all the hallmarks. He doesn’t let on, though. He  thinks it’s brilliant that he’s deduced something about Ford that neither Sherlock nor Mycroft has cottoned onto yet.)

It must be said, though, that Ford and Violet get their best mischief done when they are collaborating. They are like Sherlock and John, that way, or Mary and Nirupa. (Possibly also like Mycroft and Sally, although that pair are less about the mischief and more about the swift, incisive ending of other people’s mischief. Unless you are talking about activities involving cake, cream and a certain silk scarf.)

In the spirit of collaboration, the Flower Pants Incident was Ford’s idea, but the flourish of execution was Violet’s. You see, also like their many parents, Violet and Ford do not tolerate boredom well. They tend to make their own arrangements.

Thus it is that Ford and Violet, eleven and twelve years old respectively at the time, maintain that the whole thing was partly Sherlock and John’s fault, for not being there to provide other distractions.

Nobody blamed Mrs Hudson, of course, which was astonishing, in the face of the evidence. People tended to assume that, as much as the kids adored her, she was never going to be much of a barrier.

(To be fair to Mrs Hudson, as long as the shenanigans don’t end up with explosions, she finds Ford and Violet’s adventures to be more entertaining and less hard on the nerves and the brickwork than Sherlock anyway, and tends to let them get on with things. On this occasion, she knew perfectly well what they were up to, and decided to bake cupcakes instead of interfering.)

Sherlock and John had been there to start with, naturally, but a sudden text from the Met called them away, and Mrs Hudson volunteered to keep an eye on the kids on this school holiday afternoon.

Mrs Hudson went upstairs to find Violet and Ford inspecting a large cardboard box that had been stowed under the kitchen table. Ford had pulled it open and the children were staring at the contents with the chortling amusement that all kids had, no matter how smart, when confronted with _underthings_. Especially _decorative_ underthings. Especially when several of the packets had been opened, underthings removed and proof existed, therefore, that one or both dads either _had been_ or _was now wearing_ decorative pants. One pair of bright red pants, by the look of it, and one pair of white pants bearing a bee motif.

It was deliciously awful beyond imagining, and Ford and Violet could only hope that one day, one of the dads would be caught wearing the hilariously dreadful red or bee pants. Or better yet, the pants with little animals on them (the choices were eclectic: kittens and mice, otters and hedgehogs, even a pair of fawns).

“There’s a note!” crowed Violet, snatching it out of the box.

“With thanks for your work on our little problem,” she read in her Posh Client Voice, “The cheque is forthcoming, but please accept these goods you selected as a token of our gratitude.” She snort-giggled.

Ford pulled a pair of otter-emblazoned underpants from the box and stretched them out with his thumbs in the waistband. He popped the pair on his head like a bizarre-yet-rakish hat.  “Who’d be grateful for these?”

“I think it’s very nice of the company,” said Mrs Hudson, not bothering to tell the kids to leave the box alone. Mrs Hudson was certainly not going to be embarrassed by anyone’s brand new pairs of underpants, no matter how ridiculous, “Oh, and they’re the right sizes, too,” she observed, because she’d had to retrieve laundry from the washer, the dryer and the line often enough over the years to know these things. “Who would like cake and a glass of iced chocolate?”

Mrs Hudson took note of the enthusiastic response, told the two of them to stay out of trouble (without much expectation) and told them to come downstairs in half an hour. “And leave the doors open, so I can hear you.”

Mrs Hudson knew perfectly well that noisy children were _not_ children Up to No Good, and that even if silent, as long as there were no chemical smells and no strange bangs, any No Good that Violet and Ford got up to would probably Serve Their Fathers Right.

Violet and Ford exchanged a glance, said “Yes, Mrs H” and promptly got down to business once she left.

Half an hour later, the little angels went downstairs for cake and iced chocolate, and spent another half hour decorating the freshly-baked cupcakes for later. Violet opted for a lot of vividly purple icing with dark chocolate highlights while Ford favoured orange icing placed in complicated shapes. (He claimed his cakes could be eaten in an order specified by the icing code.)Then they washed their hands, and asked permission to return to their ‘surprise for Sherlock and Dad’.

“Are you burning anything?”

“No, Mrs H.”

“Cutting holes in anything?”

“No, Mrs H.”

“Otherwise damaging or destroying something so that it can no longer be used for the purpose for which it was made?”

“No, Mrs H.” _Nothing has been permanently harmed in the making of this mischief,_ was the solemn oath.

“Off you go then. I’ll be up to check on you in a little while.”

And the kids ran off, giggling. Not unlike, to tell their truth, their dads at a crime scene.

John and Sherlock returned before ‘a little while’ was up, just as Mrs Hudson was heading upstairs with a tin of decorated cupcakes. DI Lestrade was right behind them, complaining about evidence, or lack of evidence, or not being told about where to find the evidence, or something, with a new young sergeant in close attendance. Sherlock was being Sherlock, rolling his eyes and declaring things to be **_obvious_**! and **_tedious_**! John was very pointedly pretending the sergeant didn’t exist while at the same time giving Sherlock’s back the Glare of Exasperation.

A mere moment later, Mycroft and Sally joined the fray, having arrived to collect their son, see Violet, have a little familial chit-chat and possible snaffle some of Mrs Hudson’s baked goods for Later.

Mrs Hudson stepped through the door of flat 221B first, saw what the children had been doing, paused, grinned, said: “Lovely work” and went right on in, taking the tin of cakes to the kitchen table.

John and Sherlock came in behind her, saw what the children had been doing, and stopped dead. Sherlock blinked, understanding the _what_ of the view but failing utterly to understand the _why_. John tried to block the egress of the oncoming police, without luck. Greg pushed past them, Sergeant Doherty on his heels, and froze for a solid ten seconds until his brain recognised what he saw. Then Lestrade burst out laughing. Doherty began giggling a moment later.

Mycroft and Sally brought up the rear, avoiding the logjam by ducking in through the kitchen door, and regarded the Work of Art with a kind of awkward, embarrassed, and yet a-little-bit-proud, astonishment.

Violet and Ford had turned the living room of 221B into a garden.

A garden of red underpants rolled tightly, held at one end with a rubber band and then opened at the other end like a flower. The dozen or so red underpant flowers were tucked into single army-green socks as substitute stems and fixed to surfaces all over the flat.

A garden of bee pants, folded to create little blooms of bees that sat in puffy clouds of white cotton and bee prints all among the red flowers.

A garden of kittens and otters and mice and hedgehogs, sometimes folded in clever underpant-origami style, sometimes stretched over saucepans, bowls or, in one significant case, Sherlock’s pet skull.

A garden of colourful decorative underpants, John’s socks and undershirts in both white and khaki, Sherlock’s expensive black silk boxers, and a lavender coloured bra that Mary had left behind last visit. An array of dark and navy socks were knotted together in one corner, to make a trellis for what appeared to be an ivy vine made of John’s work ties.

It was colourful. It was creative. It was _lavish_.

It was every item of underwear John and Sherlock owned, folded, rolled, reshaped or draped to glorious effect: displayed to resplendent advantage in front of their family, friends, in-laws, landlady and a random member of the London police force.

The bee pants seemed to give Sherlock an especial pain in the forehead. Mary’s lavender bra, entwined around a pair of red pants with a nest of tiny hedgehogs curled around the base, appeared to be giving John a migraine.

“Fucking hell,” said John, one of his less inventive swears, which disappointed Violet no end, “We can’t leave you alone for five minutes, you two.”

“Can I have a pair of the bee pants?” asked Ford, innocent as a newborn lamb, “Gordon won’t ever believe they’re real unless I take evidence.” Gordon, Ford’s primary rival and best friend after Violet, was a stickler for empirical evidence.

Greg Lestrade was laughing so hard he was crying actual tears. He was less affected by the underwear garden than by the look on Sherlock’s face as he still tried to fathom the _why_. Sergeant Doherty was trying valiantly not to laugh just as hard, because she kept catching the Evil Eye in turns from Sherlock Holmes and John Watson both, but then she gave up on the effort. She was afraid she might do herself an injury otherwise. When she laughed, she _guffawed_.

Mycroft Holmes thought about not laughing, but Sally was unsuccessful at suppressing a snigger, and it set him off. (Ford was secretly enormously pleased that he made his parents laugh. It was actually one of his personal, private agenda items to make them laugh at least once a week. Sometimes his efforts result in stern and disappointed looks, which was a shame, so he really enjoyed the attempts that worked.)

John and Sherlock still looked like they had been punched in the solar plexus by a clown.

Violet gathered up a posy of red underpant flowers, including a cloud of cotton bees and the bra-and-hedgehog flower in the posy, and presented them to her father with a beaming face that didn’t fool anyone.

“Happy May Day,” she said, “We thought we’d decorate the flat in celebration of the spring.”

John took the posy with a pursed mouth and a raised eyebrow. “You did, did you?”

“Ford was in Japan last month and he was telling me how they fold clothes to look like flowers in some shops,” she offered by way of further explanation. (It was at this point that John realised the original idea had been Ford’s and levelled a _Look_ at the boy, who responded with the expression of a seraphim.  John still can’t believe that Sherlock and Mycroft haven’t twigged to it yet, though he now suspects that Sally is clued up and, like him, keeping stum.)

Sherlock bent over to examine some of the more intricate underwear-origami.

“Are these my Pi Pants, Ford?” So named because when he was four, Ford wrote pi to twenty decimal places all around the right leg of the navy silk boxers in black marker pen while Sherlock was asleep in them. Sherlock had kept them, hidden in the back of the drawer, which he suspected was now entirely free of any kind of clothing at all.

“Yes, Sherlock,” said Ford.

“You’ve added another twenty decimal places on the left leg.”

“It didn’t look balanced without them.”

“Right.” Sherlock turned to glare at Lestrade, who was still laughing. The glare was not effective.

“Bees! You and your _bees_!” snorted Lestrade, “And the _hedgehogs_!” The snort turned into a howl of laughter that set Doherty off again.

“I suppose it’s no use telling you that John chose those ones.” Sherlock’s glared lasers across the room towards John, “And the otters. He thought they were _hilarious_.”

“They are!” concurred Lestrade.

John, who had started to see the funny side, agreed. “Fucking hilarious,” he said, before remembering, much too late as usual, that he was not supposed to swear in front of the kids, “Which is what you said when you picked out the hedgehogs and the red ones for me and reminded me how well I dance when I’m drugged off my face and singing karaoke in a gay bar.”

He remembered, too late again, that the kids didn’t know that story.

Lestrade did, though. He had been there for the dancing _and_ the declarations of filial love. Doubled up with hilarity, Lestrade wrapped his arms around his ribs and tried to breathe. Finally managing it, he grabbed Dohery by the shirt sleeve and tugged her towards the door.

“One minute sir!” she pleaded. She grabbed her phone, took a photo of the underwear garden, grinned at the scowling flatmates and scarpered down the stairs ahead of her boss. Disciplinary action for the unwarranted behaviour was clearly very, very far from Lestrade’s mind as he whipped out his own phone and took a picture himself.

Silence reigned in the living room as the occupants listened to the Met giggle all the way out of 221 Baker Street. Whatever Lestrade and the sergeant had come in for had been completely forgotten. (Lestrade would text Sherlock fruitlessly for an answer to who, exactly, had committed the crime, for over three hours later in the evening. Sherlock would eventually reply. In code.)

This left Mycroft and Sally, John and Sherlock, Violet and Ford, all looking at each other and wondering what happened now.

What happened was that Mrs Hudson swept into the living room, a large and just-washed serving plate piled with iced cupcakes in one hand, a generous teapot in the other.

“Tea’s on,” she said, depositing the goodies in the front of the khaki-undershirt hedge at one end of the kitchen table, “Violet and Ford helped me decorate the cakes.” She said it like she was well pleased with their day’s efforts. All of them.

The entire family took the hint.  Tea and cakes were shared around, and while sipping a well-brewed Orange Pekoe and decoding Ford’s cupcake messages, they admired the red-pants-flower, bee-cloud, boxer-bushes, critter-den, singlet-hedge, tie-vine, sock-stem garden for the creative wonder that it was.

 

 


	15. Shock Treatment: Words Are Not Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock is good with words at crime scenes; not so much with finding words to tell the people he loves that he loves them. It's the main reason he never writes songs for John. His lyrics are all rubbish. But maybe he can make an exception for Violet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Jon English's 'Words Are Not Enough'.

Although they diminished over the years, Sherlock still sometimes had nightmares about his Year In Hell. They came randomly: after good days, after bad days, after boring days, after perfectly giddy-with-joy days. There was no pattern, which annoyed Sherlock almost more than the nightmares did.

One pre-dawn morning he jerked awake, perspiring and shivering, gasping for breath, and he lay staring at the ceiling, willing his heart to steadiness. Then he heard a tiny wail of protest from the living room, through his closed bedroom door, and then John’s voice, hushed and calming. Sherlock knew John was speaking to Violet, but let John’s voice soothe him as well. _Home. Safe.  Let the dead past be dead._

 _He should put her in the sling,_ Sherlock thought, as Violet’s baby grumbling continued, _she likes that,_ but then a flash of orange in his periphery vision reminded him that he’d had Violet in the sling last night, and that she’d gone to her father for a feed and then to sleep in her cot in John’s room. Sherlock had absent-mindedly brought the blanket in here, when he changed for bed.

He reached for the blanket, snagged it in his long fingers (that still trembled slightly) and pulled it up to his chin. He felt the weave of it against his skin, the brightness of the orange on his aching eyes. He could smell Violet’s scent on the fabric: milk and talcum powder and fabric softener and the simple smell of just Violet permeating it. Sherlock could have broken that smell down too, but mostly he just inhaled the scent and let it fill his brain with memories of John’s daughter, and home.

Sherlock remembered coming home after that awful year and falling into John like John was his personal, human shock blanket. Then he thought about everything he had gained since then. How much he had changed.

Now he could hear John singing to Violet, and her wails turning to happy burbles and squeals. Although not a burbler or a squealer himself, Sherlock understood the sentiment. There were days when John’s voice, whether speaking or singing, filled Sherlock with exactly the same kind of full-to-the-brim contentment.

Sherlock couldn’t hear John’s words, but he recognised the melody. _Binary_. One of the songs John had written for them; for him – but not taught to the band. Sherlock liked that John was singing it for Violet, though. That seemed right.

Sherlock wondered if he would ever write a song for John, the way John wrote songs about the two of them. Sherlock wrote violin parts for John’s songs, of course, but he’d never written a piece of his own for John. Well, he had, but he hadn’t played them for John. They never seemed to capture everything about him. There were so many facets to the man. One piece had come close, but Sherlock still wasn’t happy with it.

Worse, he’d tried to write music with words. He was terrible at it. For all he teased John sometimes, it wasn’t easy to write lyrics, and Sherlock invariably loathed every one of his own attempts. The words were always wrong, or inadequate, or simplistic. They didn’t sound sincere, or they sounded mawkish, or they were just… awful.

Sherlock heard John’s voice change pitch a little, moving into a new song. A brand new song, Sherlock realised.

_Heave a sigh, baby girl,_  
 _Don’t you cry, baby girl_  
 _Your daddies are guarding the door_  
 _Laugh out loud, baby girl_  
 _Be strong and proud, baby girl_  
 _Keeping you safe is what your daddies are for_

Proof that even the best lyricist wrote dreadful songs. Sherlock smiled anyway. _Daddies. Plural._  This was a lullaby about the three of them.

Sherlock swung out of bed, pulled on his robe and took the shock blanket sling with him.

John was standing by the window, watching the light creep over the horizon and tint London’s skyline.

“Here,” Sherlock said.

John gave him a relieved smile and passed Sherlock the grumbling child in exchange for the blanket. While John arranged the sling over his shoulders, Sherlock jogged Violet in his arms, blew a gentle raspberry in her face and, when that didn’t work, invented a verse of the lullaby himself to sing to her in his deeper voice.

_You are strong, baby girl_  
 _Life is long, baby girl_  
 _Your daddies will sing you to sleep_

Violet burbled sleepily at him, chasing the remnants of nightmare fatigue from his nerves.

John grinned at him as Sherlock gently handed her over and between them they manoeuvred her into the blanket sling, where she snuggled down against John’s chest. Sherlock kept singing, suddenly not caring that the words were stupid and inadequate and hardly spoke a thousandth part of what was in his heart for her.

_You are smart, baby girl_  
 _You have heart, baby girl_  
 _And the hearts of your daddies to keep._

Sherlock looked up to see the second soppiest expression he had ever seen on John Watson’s face.

“What?”

“Nothing.” John’s grin widened. “Just…get a load of you.”

Sherlock cleared his throat self-consciously. John kept grinning then looked down at Violet, who was finally settling.

“How lucky are you, baby girl?” he asked her, “Two mums and two dads and we all love you to bits.”

 _How lucky am I?_ thought Sherlock. _More lucky than I deserve._

“You write songs for me,” he said suddenly to John, “I don’t write them for you.”

John lifted his gaze from his daughter to his best friend and saw something in Sherlock’s frown.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said John, his voice warm with affection,” You write music for me all the time. Everything you write with me is for me too. I know that.”

“Not words.”

John shrugged. “What you write doesn’t need words. It’s about… being stronger together. I get it.” He pushed his lower lip out thoughtfully. “Nothing I write sounds finished any more until you’ve written your parts for violin and voice. Sort of like my whole life, these days.” Being mindful of the now sleeping Violet, John leaned into Sherlock’s arm, head-bumped his shoulder then gave a slightly sheepish smile before going back to gaze at his baby.

 _I am the luckiest and least deserving of men,_ thought Sherlock. _I must try to deserve at least a fraction of it._

“Don’t suppose I can persuade you to make some tea?” said John quietly.

“I’ll even make toast,” Sherlock offered. John gave him a mock-surprised look. “I’ll even try not to burn it.” That made John giggle.

Sherlock filled and switched on the kettle, slipped bread into the toaster and in due course made toast and marmalade for John, and tea for them both. He put his own tea aside, however, in favour of his violin.

“I wrote this for you,” he said, sounding much more awkward than he thought he would when he decided to do this, somewhere in the middle of spreading orange jam on slightly singed toast. He considered adding more. _It’s not very good. It’s frankly inadequate. I wrote words but they were appalling and I burned them and I don’t remember them now._

Instead, he lifted his bow and began to play.

And John Watson cradled his daughter, let the rest of his tea go cold and let the music that didn’t need words anyway fill him up.

 _I am the luckiest and least deserving of men_ , thought John, _and I am going to hang on to all of this for as long as I can, and try to be worth it._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen to me sing [ Violet's Lullaby](http://221b-hound.tumblr.com/post/94014637285/violets-lullaby-a-guitar-man-song-john-and-mary).


	16. Unbroken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The word 'freak' has been a weapon for all of Sherlock's life. The first time he heard it, he was six years old, and he knew that it meant that he was broken and wrong. 
> 
> The first time someone levels that weapon at Sherrinford Holmes, Ford is seven. It will not break him. Not if his family has anything to do with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Missy Higgins's 'Unbroken'.

When it happened to Sherlock, he was six years old: precocious, with a sharp, quick intelligence that was usually rewarded for the clever, grown-up things he’d say. He didn’t know that sometimes he wasn’t supposed to say those things. He didn’t understand the idea of secrets. He would say what he saw, and his family would laugh, clap, give him sweets, tell him what a wonderful boy he was.

Until that day, when Sherlock saw something he was not supposed to see, and said something he wasn’t supposed to say, and his world turned upside down. Everything changed, including his father, and home became not-home in some inexplicable way. Suddenly, Sherlock wasn’t clever and special and wonderful. He was bad. Broken and wrong.  The contradiction did things to the boy that could still be seen in the man.

Ford is a little older when it happens to him, but it is just as wounding, and for a moment it looks like history will simply repeat itself.

Ford is seven years old. He’s playing with Violet at Sherlock and John’s flat. Mummy and Daddy are coming to take him home very soon – he can hear the car downstairs, the doors opening and closing, Daddy’s voice, Mummy’s laugh. But there’s time to finish the game. His parents always let them finish.

A lady is here right now to see Sherlock and John. A lot of people come to see Sherlock. A lot of them leave very quickly too, though a lot of them stay. Some of them cry, some of them shout, some of them are afraid.  Being at Sherlock and John’s place is interesting like that. Ford likes it when things are interesting. Today, though, he’s much more interested in playing with Violet. Today, Ford is pretending to be a mad scientist. Violet is being his creation, the cat-dinosaur-monkey-fish. She’s very good at it, too.

The lady says some things in an angry voice to Sherlock, who ignores her. John asks her some things, and she answers in an angry voice again, says several shouty things about her husband getting angry too, but then she turns to watch Ford and Violet playing the game. She does that smile that strangers often do. The one that says she thinks that children are cute, but not bright, and not much better than cats.

“I didn’t know you had children, Mr Holmes.”

“Irrelevant,” says Sherlock, “John and I having offspring is certainly not going to soften me up to take this case of yours. You say you don’t know who is sending the letters. That’s a lie.”

She makes a horrible noise and says: “How dare you call me a liar. And in front of these children!” As though that makes it worse. Ford doesn’t understand this thinking, but he’s not paying much attention to it, because he’s still trying to get the Violet-monster to stop destroying London (as represented by a sofa and rug piled with cushions) with her big stompy feet.

“How dare you _lie_ in front of these children,” Sherlock snaps back, which Ford thinks is a reasonable and logical response. Lying is bad. Is lying about lying twice as bad? Never mind. There are the Houses of Parliament to rescue!

“I tell you, I don’t know who is sending the letters.”

Ford gives up on saving London for a moment to say to the lady: “Is it your boyfriend?”

The lady glares at him. “I don’t have a boyfriend, young man.” She waggles her hand at him, to show him the wedding ring. Ford has no idea what that’s got to do with anything.

“But your boyfriend gave you that necklace. It’s not like your other jewellery, it’s more expensive, you can tell because of how it shines, like the necklace Daddy gave Mummy for Christmas, and you keep touching it when Sherlock talks about the letters, and when you talk about your husband your face goes all secret and you touch the necklace then too and…”

The lady shrieks. Her face is red and ugly and full of hate and she says: “What are you…? You little… _liar_.”

“I’m not a liar,” says Ford, taken aback, because he doesn’t lie, he never has, “You’ve got a boyfriend and he’s sending mean letters to you. Sherlock will find out…”

“ ** _Shut up_**!” she snarls before Ford can finish telling her that Sherlock will help her understand about the letters if she tells the truth, “Shut up you little _freak_.”

The word _freak_ is out of her mouth just as Sally and Mycroft reach the top of the stairs.

“You little _shit_ , you prying, creepy fucking little _freak_ , you…” the poison pours out of the lady’s mouth and Ford is backing away from her now. He doesn’t know why she’s so angry, but he knows he’s done something very, very, very bad. Grown- ups don’t call you names, only other kids do, names like _weirdo_ and _spas,_ so if grown-ups are calling him bad names, it must be because he’s bad. And no-one is saying anything. Not Daddy or Mummy or Sherlock or John. Not even Violet. So he must be… it must be… Ford doesn’t know why or how, but he, but he…

The shocked stillness breaks, like a thunderclap, like a storm.

Sherlock has appeared right next to him, right beside him, and Ford didn’t see him move, but Sherlock is there, on his knees, tugging Ford close to his chest and holding him tight and he is saying: “It’s all right Ford. It’s all right. You’re all right. There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing. Nothing wrong with you. You’re a good boy. You were right. She’s a liar. She is. She’s the bad one. You’re perfect.  There’s nothing wrong with you.”

And at the same time, Violet is yelling: “You leave Sherry alone, you horrible witch! Don’t you listen to her, Sherry. Don’t you listen to liars!”

And at the same time, John is yelling at the lady, with some interesting swears: “What the fucking _shite_ was that? What the _fuck_ is wrong with you? He’s a little kid, and you **_are_** a fucking liar. If you feel so fucking ashamed of yourself for having an affair, do not take it out on a _child_ , you fuckwitted _brainfart_. Get your _cankerous arse_ out of this house. _Now_.”

And at the same time Mummy is shoving the mean lady in the chest and saying nothing but she’s making a hissing noise, and then she is running to Ford and on her knees next to Sherlock and kissing Ford’s face and forehead and saying: “It’s okay, baby, Mummy’s here. The lady didn’t mean it. She’s a horrible bitch and she didn’t mean it. And she will be sorry she ever said it. It’s okay, sweetie.” And Sherlock has let him go, but like he doesn’t want to, and while Ford is folded in his mother’s arms, Sherlock is behind him, running his hand again and again over Ford’s back and telling him that he’s a good boy.

And at the same time Daddy stands there, tall and cool with that face Daddy has when someone has done something stupid and he gives the lady the smile that isn’t his nice smile and he says: “Your husband and your lover are colluding to blackmail you and embezzle from your company so that they can run away together. I would confront them, if I were you. Or let them go. Doubtless they deserve each other. I would also expect a tax audit sometime in your very near future, and trust me, the Department won’t miss the tax evasion schemes that got you into this mess in the first place. Don’t imagine that your recreational cocaine habit will go unnoticed by the police over the next few days, either. You’re welcome to run to your holiday home in Teneriffe, or your relatives in Australia, if you think it will do you any good. It won’t. Good day.”

And then Daddy is kneeling beside Mummy and holding him, and saying: “Ssshh, Sherrinford, hush now, it’s over.” (And Ford thinks that Daddy and Sherlock are looking at each other in a strange way, but he’s not interested in that any more, he just wants to be here with his three parents hugging him and telling him it’s all right.)

When Ford stops feeling sick, he peeks out from his mother’s arms and he sees that John is kneeling too. He has gathered Violet close, because she’s crying, and he’s kissing her face, one arm wrapped around her back. John has his other hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, squeezing it.

One of Sherlock’s hands is still on Ford’s back; the other is on the back of Violet’s head, thumb stroking her hair. His face is pale and motionless, like a statue. His hands, though, are shaking. (Rage and tenderness and despair undo him in ways that even Moriarty failed to achieve.)

Violet sobs again and, almost blindly, Sherlock leans towards her, kisses the top of her head. He doesn’t know how to shield these children, and he’s supposed to know everything. He hates not knowing. He hates failing them. He will not let Ford grow up thinking that he is broken, he _won’t_.

Violet moves in her father’s arms, turns, and though she is leaning against John’s chest, and John’s arms are now wrapped around her, holding her close to him, her hands are patting Sherlock’s face. _It’s all right_ , she seems to be saying.

 _She’s uncanny,_ Sherlock thinks, _a marvel._

Violet hiccups a little as her own tears cease, and turns her face to see if her friend is all right now.

The lady has gone away, and Ford feels like he can breathe again. He knows he’s not like other children. He knows he’s not quite right, really, but he usually doesn’t mind, because he’s like his Daddy and Sherlock. He’s not all alone in being a little bit strange. He doesn’t mind because Mummy loves him and Violet and John love him, and Mrs H loves him, and the Lestrades and the Andersons love him, and they don’t mind that he’s different. They don’t mind. They don’t.

Mycroft’s arms squeeze tight around his son. “Good boy, Sherrinford,” he says, “You’re a good boy. But we need to have a little talk. Some people get frightened when you tell them their secrets. They think nobody knows, you see. So we have to learn when to say what we know; so that we don’t make them frightened.”

“Am I a freak?” Ford asks in a very small voice indeed.

 “No,” says Daddy, “You are just like your fathers. We see things.  That’s all.”

“Of course not,” says John, “You’re amazing. Just like your dad.”

“No,” says Sherlock, whose voice is close to breaking, “You’re different but you’re perfect.”

“No, sweetheart,” whispers Mummy, “You’re special. It’s because you’re special that you have to learn to be careful.”

Violet wriggles free from her father and Sherlock’s trembling hand and pushes herself into the centre of those loving bodies surrounding Ford.

“You know all of my secrets already Sherry, and I don’t care, I want you to know them, because you’re my best friend and you’re smarter than anybody ever.” She kisses his face, because that’s what both her Mums and both her Dads do to her when she’s sad and scared.

Ford, his head resting on his father’s shoulder, his hands in his mother’s hands, blinks at Violet.

“You destroyed London,” he says, “with your dinosaur feet and your fish tail.”

“No,” says Violet firmly, “You made friends with the monster and we were best friends forever and rebuilt London, and then all the other mad scientists came to say thank you and together we scared away the other mean monster, and then we all had cake and ice cream.”

“That, daughter of mine,” says John, “Is an excellent plan. I bought Hobnobs this morning too. And Jaffa Cakes.”

“Jaffa Cakes!” shouts Violet in approval, “Jaffa Cakes and ice cream! Scientist food!”

John gives Sherlock a _look_ , because quite obviously Violet has seen how Sherlock sometimes breaks his occasionally days-long fasts, and really, Sherlock’s a very bad example of nutritional common sense.

Sherlock, calm now, raises an eyebrow. “You’re forgetting the important ingredient,” he says.

Ford giggles. “Pickles!”

“And…?” Sherlock prompts.

“Stewed bugs and onions!”

“And…” prompts John, because listing food for scientists is an old game.

“Eyeballs!” Violet chimes in, just as Ford is shouting, “Toenails!” and the children are giggling madly and clutching each other in their mirth.

“Warts,” suggests Mycroft, which has Ford and Violet pulling faces and patting their stomachs in pretend delight.

“With chocolate sauce,” says Sally, but then, realising she’s not capturing the mood of the game, adds, “And maggots.”

Shrieks of delight greet this addition.

And like that, just like that, the storm passes, and what might have been broken is not.

Ford will learn some hard lessons, in due course, and will learn to hold his tongue, but though he will always know that he is strange and different, he will never believe that he is broken and wrong.

Not ever.

 


	17. Shock Treatment: Medley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The shock blankets have been used in a variety of ways over the years, and have fabulous stories to tell. Here are three of them.

1.

Mary and Nirupa arrived at 221B at the same time as Mycroft and Sally. All four of them were there to collect the children, who had spent the day with their fathers. They got upstairs to fine three-year-old Ford and four-year-old Violet ensconced with their fathers in a giant orange shock blanket fort in the sitting room. None of them could be seen behind the high walls of blanket, which were affixed to commandeered tables and chairs. The only reason the newly arrived parents knew that both adults and children were ensconced in the blanket fort was that they could hear all four of them singing The Improbable Song. Mycroft, Sally, Nirupa and Mary stood very quietly at the door for a good three minutes listening to all the singing and giggling, before Ford’s little voice piped up: “I can smell Mummy’s perfume!”.  Everyone in the blanket fort went very, very, very quiet. Then Violet giggled. Then John giggled. Then Sherlock snorted with laughter and Ford sang out at the top of his lungs: “Shush! They’ll hear us!” That’s when everyone at the door started giggling too. Mycroft and Sherlock pretend they weren’t giggling too, but they totally were.

 

2.

John carried Violet in a shock blanket sling for the whole day when she was six months old, as the heater had given out. He danced around the sitting room with her, trying to keep them both warm. When it got even colder in the afternoon, Sherlock took up position opposite John so they shared their body heat, with Violet between them, while they talked about the current case, discussed the lyric that was giving John so much trouble in his latest song, fought over Sherlock's inconsiderate use of John's favourite mug as a receptacle for donkey gonads, and, after their sniping had woken Violet up, sang silly songs together until they were both laughing and she blew baby raspberries at them. Sherlock would otherwise have been downstairs tearing strips off the heater repairman. Instead, Mrs Hudson tore strips off the repairman, but then gave him cake.

  
3.

Sherlock worked out how to make the shock blanket sling into a papoose, so he could carry a two-year-old Ford on his back while conducting experiments with acid, electrical circuitry and the microwave. Ford slept through the ensuing explosion but cried when he saw Sherlock's strange, sooty face straight afterwards. The burns were relatively minor, but Sherlock's eyebrows took three weeks to grow back. By then, Ford was finding Sherlock's naked brows hilarious, and had drawn them in eight times in three weeks with different coloured marker pens whenever he visited. Once, he drew in 'pretty eyelashes'. John tried to convince Sherlock to wear giant sunglasses to crime scenes, but Sherlock genuinely didn't care what people thought about his weird eyebrows. That's not entirely true. Sherlock actually really enjoyed telling people who asked about his scribbled-in blue texta brows that 'Ford drew them in'. John has a series of pictures of Sherlock with different coloured texta eyebrows which he showed to Violet when she, Mary and Nirupa came back to London when Violet was twelve. They laughed a lot.  


 


	18. In Time You'll Wake to Find Joy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of Ford's family shielding him from the accusation of 'freak', Sally Donovan realises that she owes Sherlock Holmes an apology. She doesn't know if he'll accept it, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A follow up to [Unbroken](http://archiveofourown.org/works/522693/chapters/977033)
> 
> The title comes from lyrics to Missy Higgins's 'Unbroken'.

 

“You know it’s what I used to call him, don’t you?”

Sally is standing at the window, watching the rain, but she is speaking to Mycroft. Mycroft is sitting at the kitchen table, reading a report.  It’s late, and Ford is in bed. Their son seems completely unfazed by the afternoon’s events, that appalling woman’s attack on him.  If anything, he was particularly happy, positively aglow.

Their little boy chattered away to them, dressed in his favourite pyjamas. They used to be plain sky blue, but once while staying overnight at Baker Street, Ford and Sherlock drew chemical symbols all over the pyjama pants. Symbols for water, for milk, for sugar. There’s a crude drawing of a bee in there somewhere, too. Ford absolutely refused to let anyone wash them, so Mycroft had the designs redrawn in permanent dye. Mycroft understands Ford’s attachment to the things, but hygiene is still important.

“I know,” Mycroft says to Sally. He puts the report down and watches her. She sees him watching her in the reflection of the dark window.

They don’t say either of the names she means. Freak. Sherlock. They both know perfectly well what Sally is talking about. Ever since that afternoon, when she and Sherlock knelt together on the carpet and wrapped their love as a shield around that little boy, and told him he was not wrong, not freakish, Sally has been in something of a state.

“I didn’t know,” Sally says quietly, “I didn’t understand. Not till Ford.”

“I know, love.”

“The look on Ford’s face.” Sally is holding her eyes wide open, but her tears can’t be fooled that easily. One spills from the corner of her eye and down her nose.  A mother’s rage becomes the most awful, cutting tenderness, she finds. Sally could shoot that terrible woman between the eyes, and it wouldn’t stop this helpless, lacerating sorrow.

Mycroft rises from the chair and appears behind her. He slides his arms around her waist and presses his cheek to hers. “He’s all right, Sally. Sherrinford will be fine.”

“I know he will.” Sally leans back into Mycroft’s arms, but the pain won’t diminish. When you love your child, sometimes the love spills over; the understanding spills over. She sees things she never saw before.

“The look on Sherlock’s face, too, Mycroft. My god. The look on his face.”

Mycroft drops a gentle kiss on Sally’s temple. “Yes.”

“How did he ever forgive me enough to let us have Ford?”

Mycroft’s lips purse. “I have often wondered how he ever forgave _me_ enough to allow us that. Let it go, Sally. He did forgive. We have Sherrinford, and Sherrinford is fine.”

Mycroft kisses her, and Sally turns in his arms to kiss him back. They end up in bed, and the report is left unread on the kitchen table.

**

Sally can tell that Sherlock is not surprised to see her at his door the following morning. He looks like he wishes she hadn’t come, but he seems resigned to it as well.

She sort of wishes she hadn’t come too, but she lay awake half the night, Mycroft spooned along her back while she stared at the wall, and she knew this morning that coming to Baker Street was inevitable. Might as well do it sooner than later. Apologies only get harder the longer you leave them, and as late as this one was, delays wouldn’t help.

“Well?” says Sherlock, more distracted than aloof. He is busy with a microscope and slides at the table and seems annoyed to be interrupted in general, rather than annoyed to be interrupted by Sally in particular.

Sally takes a deep breath. Screws her courage to the sticking place, as they say. “I came to apologise.”

“Lovely. Are you done, then? I’m busy.”

Of course, Sally knew better than to expect her apology to be accepted, but god, the man makes it difficult. She watches Sherlock as he looms over the microscope, squinting at whatever the slides tell him, and for a second she can see Ford in him, or Sherlock in Ford. The way Ford peers at new things and then asks a hundred questions while staring at the object in question.

“No, Sherlock, I’m not done.”

“Oh.” Sherlock stands straight and turns to face her. He seems mostly impassive, a little irritated and… a little something else, too. That reminds her of Mycroft. The subtleties of his expressions that she’s learned to read.

Oh, these Holmeses, including her son, these Holmeses don’t ever let her take anything for granted.

“I am sorry for the names I called you,” says Sally, being specific, because the Holmes boys, they like the specifics, no matter their age, “I’m sorry for every one of them. And I’m especially sorry for… for ‘freak’. Yesterday, when that woman spoke to Ford like that… He looked so lost and scared.  I wanted to tear her apart. I wanted to move time so I could make her unsay it, or have him never hear it. Being stabbed in the chest didn’t hurt anything like the look on my little boy’s face when she called him a freak and he thought it was true.”

Sally’s voice betrays a shake, her eyes are bright with tears again. Being stabbed in the chest was infinitely preferable to her little boy’s eyes wide with shock and distress and self-horror. She closes her eyes to remember Ford that night, instead, laughing and giggling and bouncing on the bed while he recited the formulae written on his pyjamas, untouched by those moments. They saved him: she and Sherlock, and Mycroft and John and Violet, they saved her boy from letting ‘freak’ remake him as something twisted.

She opens her eyes again to find Sherlock staring at her. For a minute she thinks he’s going to tell her to fuck off, and if he does, she’ll go, and they’ll never say another word about this.

That doesn’t happen. Instead, Sherlock tilts his head to one side, brow furrowed. Then, he gives an almost imperceptible short, sharp nod.

“Ford is… better than me,” he says at last, quietly and steadily, “He will be a better person than I am. Because you are a better mother than we had. You show him that he’s human, not just a brilliant creature, not just brains. You hold him. Mycroft and I… were not held. We didn’t know what that could mean.” He swallows. “You love Ford and protect him, and we didn’t really have that either. Well, I had Mycroft for a time, I suppose. That didn’t really work out.”

Before Sally can reply, Sherlock takes a fortifying breath and steps towards her, to stand close and look her in the eye.

“None of us are who we were. We’ve all changed. We helped to change each other. That past is done. Those people we were are dead. We’re new people now, and  I don’t care one single jot about who we used to be.”

He hesitates slightly, but then he bends to kiss her cheek. Sally, too startled to do anything but blink, lets him.

“Mycroft loves you,” says Sherlock, “And Ford loves you. I’ve learned that love can be transmitted via DNA. I don’t know that I love you, Sally Donovan. But… I think I’m grateful. To you. For you.  I wasn’t the same man then. Maybe I deserved it then.”

“No,” she says, emphatically “You didn’t. Nobody deserves that.”

Sherlock gives her a small smile. “I recall that I gave as good as I got. So… in retrospect. My apologies.”

She considers. Then smiles. “You’re right. Those people we used to be are gone. Friends, then?”

A return kiss on the cheek doesn’t seem right, but she offers him her hand to shake. He takes it without hesitation and folds his second hand over their joined ones, and her free hand is placed over the top of his, and they stand for a moment, four hands clasped. Their hands move once, a clear shake on the new deal, and then they let go.

“Now,” says Sherlock, turning from her, “If we’re done, I have things to do. Forgers to catch. Don’t you have miscreants of your own to deal with?”

“They’re having a day off,” says Sally, mouth quirking in a grin, “I like to lull them into a false sense of security before the second smackdown of the week.”

She sees Sherlock’s quick smirk, but he keeps on at his task. So like Ford, in that way.

“I’ll give your regards to Mycroft, then,” she says.

“And my love to Ford.”

“Of course.”

Sally lets herself out.

Her relationship with Sherlock is as complex as ever, she knows. In-laws, parents to a remarkable child, former enemies, sort of friends. But what they are today is at peace with each other.

 

 


	19. Stand By Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As requested: a story about Mycroft and Ford.
> 
> When Mycroft can't sleep, which is often, he watches his little son, and tells him stories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from the song 'Stand By Me' by Ben E King.

When Mycroft can't sleep – which is often; it's something of a family trait – he spends his sleepless hours in his son's room, just watching Sherrinford sleep.

 _Perhaps_ , Mycroft thinks, _I am making sure he is still real and nobody has taken him away yet._  
  
No-one would dare try. Anyone with eyes can see that Sherrinford's mother would fight all the hordes of hell to protect her baby son. And anyone with eyes can see that Sally Donovan, terrifying as she can be, would be child's play compared to Mycroft Holmes, who would become the Devil himself for that boy's sake.   
  
Love is fierce. Love is _ferocious_. And love is tender and gentle and kind, too.  
  
When Sherrinford is a  tiny baby, sleeping in his parents' room, Mycroft watches and listens for the shifts and sighs and whimpers that signal the child is about to wake. Then, before the infant is quite awake and wailing, Mycroft reaches into the cot and picks the boy up, Although his left hand is a little misshapen now, Mycroft's hands are strong, and Sherrinford Holmes is so very tiny and vulnerable. Mycroft easily lifts the boy up and against his chest. With the baby cradled in one arm, Mycroft checks everything. Temperature, pulse, wetness, how focused the eyes, how regular the breathing. Mycroft spend three days with a doctor learning all the possible signs of both health and illness to look for in his infant son, and he mentally runs through the list every time he sees the boy. Which is often. Whenever he can. _Heads of State_ have been kept waiting while Mycroft Holmes spent an extra minute with his son.  
  
If in the night Sherrinford's nappy needs changing, Mycroft lifts his baby up close and murmurs to him while carrying him to the change table. He talks quietly, runs his hands over Sherrinford’s limbs, keeping the contact constant and reassuring. Mycroft cleans and moisturises that delicate skin, replaces the nappy with fresh, soft, organic, chemical-free cotton, and wraps him up again. Always talking, always touching.  
  
Mycroft doesn't remember his own infancy. Of course he doesn't. But he remembers Sherlock's. He remembers the nannies. He remembers the distance. He remembers being fascinated and wanting to help, even though that tiny intruder into the quiet balance of the household was noisy and strange and emitted bodily fluids at inopportune times. He remembers Sherlock being left to cry himself out, and being told not to go to his little brother, or 'how will he ever learn?'.  
  
Mycroft never knew what a baby of two months was meant to learn by being left to cry. He suspects it was nothing more than 'don't bother the busy grown-ups'. The fact is that Mycroft couldn't bear it then, and he can't bear it now. The difference is that now, he's the grown-up, and it's no bother to hold his son, to speak to him, to let that tiny human know that he is not alone, and never will be.  
  
If Sherrinford turns out to be hungry (and that's usually the first thing Mycroft checks for, after changing messy nappies, because who wants to eat while wrapped in squalid cotton?) Mycroft will wake Sally, and they'll sit together in soft light while Sherrinford seeks the nipple and nuzzles into his mother. Mycroft approves of this. Nuzzling into Sally is one of his favourite things, too. Sally has a gift for nourishing her little family, one way or another.  
  
To tell the absolute truth, Mycroft Holmes does not know how he achieved this miracle: this strong and beautiful wife and the child they adore. He'd always thought that Sherlock would be the only person he could or would ever love, and really, he made a terrible hash of that. He tried to love through reason and discipline, and that was never going to work. But here is a little boy who is the best and most perfect combination of everyone Mycroft holds dear, and is his to cherish.  
  
The most dangerous man in England is thorough in everything he does. He is always aware of all the angles, all the possibilities. And even though love doesn't work like that; even though there are great sweeps of the future for him, for Sally, for Sherrinford, that are less than predictable, nothing is going to stop Mycroft from loving his family as thoroughly as he does everything else.  
  
Sometimes, if Sherrinford is not hungry and in a clean nappy and still doesn't want to sleep, Mycroft walks around their home, his son in his arms, and he tells the boy stories. Some of them are true, about the things his fathers did when they were children, or about his mother, Sally. Some of the stories are make-believe. Some of them are wishes. Sherrinford is too young to understand the words, but voices hold meanings other than language, and an infant understands those things very well. _Safety. Love. Comfort. Home._

In some ways, Mycroft’s telling those stories in that voice to himself as well as to Sherrinford. After all, there was no-one ever to tell them to Mycroft, when he was little.

In later years, Mycroft will look in on Sherrinford as he sleeps, at five years old, at ten, at seventeen, at twenty. He never loses his fascination for his child. He never loses the instinct to watch. In some of those years, the boy will wake and his dark brown eyes will meet his father's gaze, and Sherrinford will smile, contented. A sort of 'there you are, everything’s all right’ smile. Then he'll go back to sleep.  
  
Mycroft Holmes considers this one of his life's greatest achievements. That his son feels safe and protected in his presence, in the way that Mycroft and Sherlock never felt with their own father.  
  
And when Mycroft is very, very old, Sherrinford will come home to see his parents. Ford will spend nights sitting with his father, his dark-skinned hand placed gently over his father's pale, wrinkled, spotted, bony hands. And Sherrinford will tell his father stories, about the adventures he and Violet have had, about Mars and space, and how bees don't like low gravity much. And Mycroft will feel safe, and protected, and he’ll sleep.

 


	20. When You’re Smiling On Me (That is all I need)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented and offered support after I posted Stay. As an offering to cheer us all up, here is some unmitigated schmoop about fathers, sons, brothers (both in blood and in spirit) and general childish shenanigans. And blame Mark Gatiss for the spoons. (I certainly do.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title comes from Gotye's 'In Your Light' (which I also used in 'Remade' as John's happy song for Sherlock.)

It was, Mycroft supposed, a sort of Mexican standoff.

In one corner, Sherlock Holmes,  43 years old, breathing hard, raised hands encased in thick rubber gloves, body shielded behind a leather apron, pale skin flushed a kind of fuchsia with exertion.

In the other corner, Sherrinford Holmes, seven years old, clean hands raised and fingers waggling with a wicked intent, his body shielded by nothing more than a child’s bath towel, tied toga-style across his narrow shoulders, brown skin flushed with excitement.

“Ford…” said Sherlock warningly.

“Sheeerlock,” drawled the child back in a like tone.

“Really. Ford. No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ford.”

“Your eyes say yes,” said Ford, “And that muscle next to your mouth. And your feet.”

Mycroft and Sherlock both looked down at Sherlock’s feet. Sherlock was balanced on the balls of his feet, shifting minutely. Sherlock looked up at Mycroft, who shrugged as though he was helpless in the face of the evidence, and then Sherlock looked at Ford.

Ford’s face took on a cherubic, or possibly demonic, grin. He waggled his fingers.

He charged.

Sherlock took off, the child in hot pursuit.

Sherlock zigged. Ford zagged. Sherlock doubled back. Ford ran right over the top of the coffee table, missing Sherlock by a whisker, and then Sherlock skimmed back and ran right over the top of the coffee table, leaping to the shelter of the far end of the sofa.

Ford ran at him, feinted, sent Sherlock, hands still raised in the air, darting behind Mycroft, who stood very still, at least until Ford darted in front of him, whereupon Mycroft obligingly dropped to a crouch, tucked his head in and commanded “Up!”. (It was hell on his knees, of course, but one mustn’t let opportunities like this get away. Oh no.)

Ford sprang straight up onto his father’s back, and then straight at Sherlock, who stumbled backwards. “Don’t touch the gloves!”

Ford, bare feet squarely on the floor of 221B once more, squealed in triumphant glee as Sherlock was pressed to the wall, hands still raised, and Ford was finally able to get his wriggling fingers past the sides of the narrow apron and into Sherlock’s ribs.

In order to better enjoy the show, Mycroft, now seated on the floor, just turned to watch Sherlock squirming and twitching to escape Sherrinford’s merciless fingers.

“No. No. Ah! Ford!!” Sherlock squirmed some more, tried to turn away and pulled the apron out of alignment, which only exposed his belly to the same treatment as his ribs.

“ **A-HA**!” shouted Ford, and went at Sherlock’s ribs and belly with a will.

“To the left!” Mycroft called out, “He was always more ticklish on his left side!”

Ford obligingly concentrated his attention on the left of Sherlock’s ribcage and belly. Sherlock, rather startlingly, shrieked, and even more startlingly, giggled. Then he drew a sharp, shocked breath on himself and glared at Mycroft. Well, for a second anyway, maybe two, before he realised that Ford was tugging Sherlock’s shirt out of his trousers.

“Ford! No!”

“Your eyes still say yes!!” shouted Ford.

“They do, you know,” said Mycroft, very reasonably. “Oops, Sherlock. Gloves. Up.”

Sherlock thrust his wavering arms into the air with a stricken look at the boy.

Mycroft knew there wasn’t anything more dangerous on the gloves than axle grease, but given that the boy was obviously straight from the bath, and that Ford had missed a spot of axle grease behind his ear, Mycroft deduced that Sherlock was none too keen on reliving that bit of mischief just yet, whatever it had been.

Wresting the last of the garment free, Ford pulled Sherlock’s shirt up high, well out of the way, leaned in and blew a massive raspberry on the side of Sherlock’s stomach.

Sherlock shrieked, wriggled and a protest and hiccup turned suddenly into full throated laughter, descending rapidly into giggles.

“No, no, no, Ford, stop it, no.”

Ford was merciless, little fingers dancing over Sherlock’s ribs, laughing lips blowing raspberries all over Sherlock’s belly.

“No no nonononono,” Sherlock managed to dance aside briefly and glare accusingly at his brother.

“Why doesn’t he do this to you?"

“What makes you think he doesn’t?” asked Mycroft, with a beatific smile.

The beatific smile was a mistake. All of a sudden, Ford left off Sherlock’s torture and launched himself at his father with a somewhat terrifying yell of “DADDY!!!!!”

Mycroft, lap full of hurtling child, absorbed the momentum by falling backwards onto the carpet and couldn’t get up and away in time before Ford’s fingers had burrowed under his waistcoat and shirt to attack his father’s ribcage with the same skill and determination lately applied to his other father.

Mycroft wriggled, protested feebly, scrunched his eyes up, then broke into a snorting giggle. Ford shouted his approval at this development, and, sitting across his father’s legs, pulled up Mycroft’s shirt, all the better to blow raspberries on his pale belly.

Much shrieking from both parties ensued.

“The right side, Ford, the right!” Sherlock was encouraging maliciously from the wings, “And see if you can get his navel.”

More shrieking. Mycroft managed to grab Ford around the waist and tickle Ford in return. Ford wriggled, shrieked some more and then flung his arms into the air and threw himself with dramatic flair sideways onto the carpet, where he lay in his toga, giggling like a lunatic. Mycroft lay next to him, gasping for air and grinning like a loon himself, and Sherlock, sagged against the wall, also gasping, was grinning down at the pair of them. Also somewhat loonily.

Sherlock stripped off the gloves.

“Any hurry to get home?” he asked Mycroft, “John’s picking up Chinese for tonight. I can text him to get extra.”

“Given the fact that I am not sure I’ll be able to get off the floor for at least another half hour, even that might be problematic.”

Sherlock fished out his phone and texted John. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Ford and I can throw kung pao chicken at your face until you catch some.”

On the floor, Ford giggled and said: “My aim is good, isn’t it Daddy?”

“You have excellent hand to eye coordination, Sherrinford,” agreed Mycroft cheerfully, “But I’m less sanguine about Sherlock.”

Ford sat up, wriggled over to Mycroft and kissed his Daddy’s cheek. “I’ll feed you. You won’t have to get up at all.”

“And so it begins again,” intoned Sherlock.

Mycroft arched an eyebrow at Sherlock, but the action lacked its normal sardonic powers of persuasion, given that Mycroft was flat on his back on the floor with his shirt and waistcoat in disarray. Mycroft’s addition of: “Bite me, Sherlock” didn’t add much to his air of authority.

Sherlock just huffed a laugh at him. “Need a hand up?”

Mycroft had reached out to pull Ford into a hug, and the boy had collapsed willingly into his father’s embrace. Ford was currently snuggled into Mycroft’s side and patting his father’s exposed stomach in gentle circles. He seemed to be watching the patterns he was making in Mycroft’s stomach hair. It was entirely possible he was creating a stomach hair version of crop circles. Ford started to hum, at any rate, a chirpy little tune that was soon recognisable as The Improbable Song.

“No,” said Mycroft, closing his eyes, “I’m fine.”

Sherlock peeled off the apron and dropped it on top of the gloves by the door.

Mycroft, eyes closed, didn’t see the way Sherlock watched him and Ford, an indulgent smile softening the corners of his mouth. With Ford humming by his ear, Mycroft didn’t hear, either, when Sherlock deftly slid his mobile phone out of his pocket again and started filming. Just a few moments’ worth.

Sherlock didn’t think it would be possible to forget that scene, but he filmed it anyway. To be sure. To be certain he’d never forget it, no matter what.

To make up for the moment of unseen sentiment, Sherlock did indeed lob kung pao chicken at Mycroft’s face at least once during the meal. To John and Sherlock’s surprise, Mycroft caught it in his teeth, swallowed it, gave them an insufferable smile, and, when Ford jumped up on his chair to cheer, high-fived his son. 

(Sherrinford Holmes was fully aware that his Daddy was much more awesome than anyone except Mummy gave him credit for. Daddy could catch popcorn in his teeth, he was the best at hide and seek, he sometimes blew hilarious, giggle-inducing, farty-sounding raspberries on Mummy’s tummy and even fartier ones on Ford’s tummy, and although Daddy played the piano and sang beautiful, important-sounding songs, he could also play the spoons. But Ford had promised Daddy to never tell a soul about the last bit.)

But Mycroft let the cat out of the bag when John dumped a pile of plates and spoons on the table, prepatory to fetching the tub of ice-cream he'd bought for dessert. Ford picked up two of the spoons and attempted to make them rattle in the right way.

John returned to the table with the ice-cream and, along with Sherlock, watched Ford, trying to work out what he was up to. Ford, all concentration and keeping his promise to Daddy, didn’t try to explain.

“Here, Sherrinford,” said Mycroft at length, “Like this.” He picked up two of the spoons and slipped the handle of one spoon in the gap between the index and middle finger of his right hand, another in the gap between the middle and ring finger. The spoons, placed back to back, were held firmly at the stem, but loosely at the bowl. Then he tapped the spoons against his cupped left hand. Then he tapped them against Ford’s chest, his own chest, his own thighs, then Ford’s, and Ford’s shoulders and stomach.

When Sherlock leaned to close to see how it worked, Mycroft tapped them against Sherlock’s forehead, making his brother scowl.

Ford giggled.

“Nice rhythm,” said John, “You should join the band.”

“You don’t reach my exacting standards for musical silverware,” said Mycroft mildly, “Can you get some teaspoons?”

John obliged, and Mycroft handed these to Ford. “Try those. These ones are too big for your hands for now.”

Ford took the teaspoons, concentrated mightily while he placed them correctly between his fingers, and began to tap them against his chest and legs. As he got better at it, Sherlock extended his arm and Ford played the spoons against Sherlock’s biceps and then forearm. The sound was higher and lighter than that from Mycroft’s larger spoons.

Then Mycroft joined in with his spoons again, and the low and high clanking combined was kind of daft and sort of actually musical, and then Ford started humming the Improbable Song again. So John started singing it. And Sherlock started singing it.

And, well, that was pretty much a perfect day.

 

 


	21. Shock Treatment: You Are My Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the age of eight, Ford often sneaks into 221 Baker Street to see Mrs Hudson before school without anyone else knowing. When he's 15, he find her in a distressed heap at the bottom of the stairs with a broken hip. But Ford knows exactly what to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is, of course, from that old song, 'You are my sunshine', originally recorded in August 1939 by The Pine Ridge Boys but popularised in 1940 by Jimmie Davis and made famous later by Bing Crosby.

Ford Holmes liked coming around to 221B Baker Street on holidays, after school and on weekends to see his donor-father Sherlock and Sherlock’s friend-and-colleague John Watson. But one of the things he liked best was sneaking in before school to see Sherlock and John’s landlady, Mrs Hudson, who was practically a grandma to Ford.

Ford was eight years old when he’d first sneaked off with the keys to 221B, had a spare set made and then used them to slip into the house to visit his nearly-grandma without anyone else knowing. Mrs H used to worry about him, a small boy nipping around London on his own when he was supposed to be at school. Especially when Ford was meant to be under surveillance. (It wasn’t until she called Mycroft and discovered that Mycroft knew of Ford’s mini-truancies and let him get away with them as long he was back at school by the first bell; a dangerous indulgence, Mrs Hudson thought, but heaven knew the Holmeses were a badly behaved lot and none of them were very good at rules.)

Well, Mrs Hudson supposed it couldn’t be proper truancy if Ford wasn’t actually missing school, and Ford wasn’t in danger if his surveillance knew where he was at all times, so she stopped fussing and started looking forward to the random visits. Ford would pop in to talk, to tell her odd bits of news about his week, or to bring flowers. Not always pretty ones, mind, but things he thought were interesting.

He brought her a bird skull once, perfectly clean and quite delicate. Ford thought that it was fascinating. She did appreciate the thought, and realised it was quite pretty in its macabre way, but he’d noticed her discomfort and next time he brought a lemon tart which he said his father had made. Then Mrs H found that a friend’s daughter created art with bones and feathers, and handed over the peculiar treasure. The friend’s daughter turned the tiny skull into a sort of _memento mori_ brooch that had no business being as lovely as it was. Mrs H wore it for Ford’s next visit, and the look of delight and pride on his face was something marvellous. (Mrs H took to wearing it to funerals after that, which seemed just right to her, fitting, even if it wasn’t entirely proper, but then, neither was Mrs H, was she, really?)

Mrs Hudson always had things at the ready for Ford, too. She kept articles from the paper and magazines that she thought would interest him: science and space exploration, advances in chemistry, strange photographs and unusual books she picked up from antique fairs and old junk shops.

She told him about the ridiculous things Sherlock and John got up to: the bizarre clients at all hours; the nights they’d burst through the door, breathless from running and laughing like they’d just outstripped the devil; the occasional blazing rows that usually ended in either slamming doors or uproarious laughter. Between them, Ford and Mrs H would make up stories to explain all the mad shenanigans, and they were always a million miles from the truth, but they didn’t care. Making up stories was immense fun.

Mrs Hudson even told him about the music: exuberant songs with lovely harmonies that the boys worked on into the night; and music full of melancholy and sweetness played in the late, dark hours that perhaps they didn’t know she could hear, when she knew one or both of them couldn’t sleep. Mrs H had sleep troubles enough of her own, between her hip and the growing collection of aches and pains. She always knew more than they thought she did, and she was judicious in how much she told Ford, too, though she told him more as he got older himself. (Though she kept the secret of the songs she heard through the walls that she knew Sherlock and John never played with the band. They were private songs, and not for sharing. Not even with Ford.)

Mrs H made Ford his favourite cakes and biscuits, too. She knitted him an orange jumper once, which was just the right shade to compliment his dark skin, and he’d grinned like it was every Christmas ever. In return, he had woven her a thin silk cord for her glasses, so she could wear them around her neck instead of misplacing them all the time. He’d pointed out that the cord, made of red silk thread, also contained strands of his own and Violet’s hair, which he’d asked Violet to send especially, so that a reminder of them was always close to Mrs H, and so she’d know they were always thinking of her too. The cord had been wrapped in a lovely, affectionate letter from Violet, who was somewhere in Ghana at the time. Mrs H had cried a little, and she and Ford had spent their morning talking about how much they both missed Violet.

Ford talked to her a lot about Violet, and about his parents, and Sherlock and John. Things he thought he understood about them, things he felt about them. He talked about school and home and how he was different, but how that was mostly okay, and how his head got too full, and she would let him talk and talk and talk and talk, letting him uncork it all, all the thoughts falling out of his head through his mouth, and she’d let him. Then she’d give him cuddles and cakes. And it always made that noise in his head go quiet and feel better. Daddy and Mummy and Sherlock and John would listen but then try to help him codify and label and control it. Only Violet and Mrs H let him just babble until his head was empty and then hug him as though the torrent didn’t matter. They didn’t try to control it, or teach him to control it. They just let it happen and then hugged him. He liked that. It made him feel less strange, somehow.  

Their irregular morning ritual – sometimes every morning for a week, sometimes only once a month – lasted from the time Ford was eight years old until he moved away from London. After that, he phoned her every day.

In the seventh year of their morning ritual, when Ford was 15, he let himself into 221 Baker Street only to find Mrs H in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs.

“ _Sherlock! **John!**_ ” shouted Ford as he ran to her side, dropping to his knees and going through the first aid checklist John had drilled into him for ten years, looking for signs of life, injury, blood, hazards. “Mrs H, can you hear me?”

Mrs Hudson opened her eyes. All Ford wanted to do was kiss away the tears there, kiss away the obvious pain, but he knew that this was not how pain management worked.

“It’s all right,” he said, patting her hair gently, “I’ll get help.”

“They’re not in,” said Mrs Hudson in a distressed rasp, “I took the mail up. I slipped.”

“I know. Shh.” Ford already knew, at a glance, what had happened, and that Mrs H had slipped from the fourth step, and that her hip was broken, and that she had been lying on the floor for ten minutes, and that she was in shock, and that she was trying not to cry, and that it hurt more than she could bear, and that she had eaten eggs for breakfast, and that she had been knitting, and that she had meant to go the shops straight after taking the mail up, and that she had vacuumed the entry hall before finding the mail, and that she’d had a letter from her sister, and that…

Ford fisted his hands in his hair and pulled hard to make his head stop _stop **STOP**_ and then he patted her hair again.

“It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine.” Ford took his phone from his pocket, called emergency services for an ambulance and told them everything he knew that he thought was relevant, then he called his father, then he hung up and sat next to Mrs H and held her hand.

“I know it hurts,” he told her, “Help’s coming. I can’t put you into the recovery position. You’ve broken your hip, and maybe your ankle. I think it’ll be worse if I try to move you.”

“I know, dear.” She squeezed his hand, and Ford was astonished that Mrs H was trying to reassure _him_. Then he noticed how cold her hand felt,  and saw how she was starting to shiver.

“I’m going to get you a blanket,” he said, rising.

“No... don’t leave…”

“Don’t worry. Here.” He found her own mobile phone, which had fallen out of her pocket and skidded across the entry to end up under a side table. He called her phone from his, then put her phone by her ear and lifted his own to his mouth.

“I’m going to talk to you the whole time,” he said, hearing his own voice from his mouth and from the speaker at the same time, “I’ll be right here. But you’re in shock. I need to keep you warm. John said.” And John, on countless occasions, had indeed said that one had to be careful of shock, when going through the first aid drill. In this family, first aid drills and escapology lessons and self-defence were what they did for fun. Everyone knew the basics.

Ford ran up the stairs, two at a time, talking to Mrs Hudson the whole way.

“Can you hear me, Mrs H? See, I’m just running up the stairs. You can probably hear my feet on the steps as well, and here’s the door. It squeaks a bit when it opens. I should probably fix that. You know Sherlock will never get around to it, or John. You can still hear me, right?”

“Yes, Ford,” Mrs H gasped at him, trying hard for his sake to stay focused, “I can hear you.”

“Good. See, you’re not alone. I know you were scared before I got here, but don’t be scared now. I’m right here. Oh god, Mrs H, this living room is a mess. There’s stuff everywhere. Worse than usual, I mean. I see why you get so mad with Sherlock. I think he’s been setting fire to… never mind. You don’t need to know. I’ll clean it up. Don’t you worry about it.”

“Ford…” A little whimper.

“I know it hurts,” he said, his voice small, then growing stronger again, “But the paramedics will be here in a few minutes. And I’ve got the blanket now. I’m coming back. Right now. Hear me on the stairs? You can hear me and now you can see my feet, and I’m right here.”

Ford settled the bright orange blanket lightly over her, tugging it up to her shoulders. He switched off her phone, and his, and resumed patting her hair.

“See, I’m here.”

“Yes,” she gave him a weak, wavering smile, “I can see.”

“And I’m not going anywhere now. Just keep looking at me, and don’t be scared.”

“I’m not frightened, Ford.” She drew a shaking breath, “You’ll look after me, I know.”

“That’s right.” He held her hand again, but when he let the silence come he could hear her pain-filled breaths and he could see the way she trembled.

“When I was little,” he told her, “Sherlock used to wrap me in a shock blanket when I got all worked up, and we’d talk about my favourite things. It helped a lot.”

“P-p-please,” she said, “T-tell me, Ford.”

He squeezed her hand again, and patted her hair, and leaned over to press the gentlest of kisses to her forehead.

“I still like orange the best,” he told her softly, as calmly as he knew how, because he knew that soft, calm voices helped you to feel still and unafraid. He had heard them all his life, when he was hurt or confused. One of those voices had always been hers, his Mrs H, his grandma.

“Your orange and poppyseed cake is the best. I love the little bits of poppyseed, and how they get caught in my teeth and if I’m very careful I can crunch them. I love sucking the cake and feeling all the little beads of poppyseed on my tongue. You think I’m mucking about to make horrible noises, but it’s just the texture. It’s the best.” She rewarded him with a little huff of laughter, though it turned into a wince and a gasp.

“You have a cashmere shawl,” he told her, “It’s mostly brown and a kind of bronze and cream, but if you look closely, there are bits of orange threaded through it. It’s beautiful, and you look especially pretty when you wear it. You’re always pretty, of course.”

“I’m an old lady,” she said, her voice cracking, “Just an old lady with fragile bones and a wrinkled old face.”

“It’s a beautiful wrinkled face.” He kissed her forehead again. “It is. And you have the best smile. And you can sometimes make Sherlock do things that even John can’t get him to do, like fix things in your flat, even though he won’t bother in his own. Violet says that in some cultures, the old women hold the community together. They have all the wisdom and all the kindness stored up, because they’ve seen and done everything already, only now they’re not busy with babies and young husbands. Now they have the time and the knowledge, so they teach the young ones how to be strong and patient and how important relationships are, not just love, but friendship and family. The young ones and the men are all idiots, so it’s the old women who keep everything going and make everything work. They’re really clever at it, and don’t boss anyone around, but they’re still the ones in charge, not through force but by understanding people. That’s you, Mrs H. You’re in charge of Baker Street, even if the idiots who live here forget sometimes.”

Ford finally stopped, wondering if he’d babbled too much, but Mrs H was smiling like she’d just remembered something important, so maybe it was okay.

 “You have the best kitchen, too,” he said, getting back on track, “I know it’s not orange, but it feels like it. It feels like the sun is always shining in your kitchen, Mrs H. It’s my favourite place, sitting in there with you and talking about everything.  I love my orange jumper, too,” he told her, “It feels like I’m wrapped in sunshine.”

With his thumb, he caught the tear that slid out of her eye and rubbed his thumb dry against his own chest.

Then the ambulance arrived, and Sherlock and John (having been contacted by Mycroft) almost immediately after, and Mrs H was given proper painkillers and taken away for proper medical treatment. John told Ford he’d done well with the first aid (which Ford already knew, but it was nice that John said so) and then Sherlock went upstairs and uncharacteristically decided he should tidy the flat. Properly. Including oiling the squeaky door at last, though he refused to do anything about the sixth step because he said that the creak it made was important in assessing clients before they’d even knocked on the door.

In the following weeks Sherlock and John also did a dozen repair jobs in Mrs Hudson’s flat, and their own, which they had neglected – some of them for up to three years. 221 Baker Street had never been more ship-shape by the time Mrs Hudson was well enough to come home. She was looking forward to having a bit of a rest, frankly. She’d had so many visitors, so often, that a spot of quiet (well, part from the usual ruckus emitting from 221B) would be welcome.

When Mrs Hudson got home, one of the first things she did was make a special batch of orange and poppyseed cakes. She texted Ford to visit on a Saturday, when they could take their time, and Ford taught Mrs Hudson how to suck at a bite of cake until the poppy seeds pressed against her tongue and palate, and she agreed that it was a wonderful sensation.

 


	22. These Fragile Times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of how Tad Anderson got stabbed in the hand to keep Greg Lestrade from being stabbed in the face. (As mentioned in The Anniversary chapter of The Sweetest Days)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is a lyric from Elton John's [Friends](http://youtu.be/Zuzi-yH9VLo).
> 
> This story references Silence and Lullaby, where Tad Anderson apologises to John for his part in Sherlock's downfall.

"Really, you should think about it," Tad Anderson said to Greg  Lestrade as they climbed out of Greg’s car, "The hours are good, it's interesting work. You get the kudos of benefiting the young ones with your wisdom, and they get to do the running around. At our age..." at this, Tad gave Greg a sideways look, knowing full well that Greg was several years old than him. Greg was scowling.

"I'm just saying it's not a bad step,” Tad continued, “You still get to be in touch with the work, but there's less of the stuff where scumbags are trying to shoot you. It’ll lead nicely to retirement in a few years’ time, if that’s what you want."

Greg knew Tad was being not only helpful but sensible, but he scowled anyway. It’s not like he and Molly hadn’t talked about him getting out of the field. He’d been the one to bring it up, even. There’d been two close shaves too many in the last year. It was still too soon to retire, with Chloe still at school, and the blow-out of the retirement age to 72 in any case. Longer, healthier life spans had seen to that necessity.

But he _was_ slowing down. One day, slowing down could turn into dead, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to do that to Molly, to the kids, or to himself. He loved his life. That was part of the problem. He loved being in the streets. Well, maybe ‘loved’ wasn’t the right word. But he made a difference there, and _that_ was what Greg Lestrade loved.

Maybe Tad was right. Maybe joining the National Policing Improvement Agency as a lecturer would be a way to keep making a difference without the risk of leaving Molly and the kids without a husband and father, one day.

“I’ll think about it,” said Greg at last, as he and Tad pushed the door of the off-licence open and went looking for beer and wine for the afternoon’s party at the Lestrade-Hoopers.  God. His twin boys were eighteen years old. His baby girl Chloe was sixteen. When the hell had that happened?

“Come in some time,” Tad responded enthusiastically, “Sit in on a class or two, see how it runs. I’ll even give you a graduate T-shirt.” Tad grinned and thrust out his narrow chest to display the course motto written in white across the dark green cotton: _Discrepancies must be explained, not explained away_. Tad was especially delighted with the shirts because they hadn’t been his idea. One of the office staff had come up with it, cashing in on the popularity of the course elective.

Greg laughed at Tad’s cheery enthusiasm. “Yeah, yeah I’ll do that.”

“What do you think of this, then?” said Tad, attention diverted by a display of wines on special by the dozen, “Spanish or Australian?”

Greg laughed. “No idea. I’m a beer man.”

The shop door opened with a clatter, eased shut again. The sound of boot-clad feet striding into the shop and then silence.

There was a quality to that silence that Greg and Tad knew too well, and when the first voice spoke, they already knew it was a robbery in progress.

It took exactly twenty eight seconds for everything to go horribly wrong.

Five seconds for the first robber, a wiry, skinny fellow with bad skin, to wave his gun in the store owner’s face and make a demand for money.

Five seconds for his twitchy mate, a tall, solid, muscular bloke, edgy with nerves or more probably drugs, to stride up to Greg and Tad, waving his unfolded jack-knife at them, warning them to _keep fucking still_.

Three seconds for Tad and Greg, who knew better than to make a bad situation worse this early in the piece, to put up their hands, palms spread, trying to keep the knife-wielder something like calm.

Ten seconds for Greg to see that the gun was a replica and not even functional. Another two to glance at Tad and see that he’d seen the same thing.

Although both police officers, Greg and Tad didn’t work together at the pointy end of field work. Before taking up the lecturing position at the Agency, Tad Anderson had been in forensics – very much at the mopping up end of the spectrum.  The occasional stint undercover with the band hadn’t exactly seen them develop the sharp and almost psychic connection in the field, the way John and Sherlock had. 

What they both had, however, was basic training and knowledge of procedures. Neither of them planned to jump anyone. Even if the gun wasn’t a threat, the knife certainly was, so they could wait. No-one was actually in danger of being shot, so there was time enough to see how things played out. At least wait until the perps had left the shop.

Except that the shopkeeper had been robbed three times in the last two years, and he was fed up to the gills with that shit. And twenty-eight seconds after the first thief had raised his useless gun, the store owner replied _fuck off_ , pulled out a cricket bat and smacked the thief in the head with it.

The gun went flying and the thief went down, squealing, with blood from his split eyebrow filling his right eye and dripping onto his shirt.

The twitchy guy with the knife spun around to see what was happening, then cursed a blue streak as he lunged at the store owner. He got in under the cricket bat, grabbed the yelling shopkeeper by the shirt-front with his left hand and dragged him over the counter. The twitchy thief’s right hand, gripping the knife, was swinging down.

Greg was on the attacker in a second, grabbing for the knife hand, pulling and twisting at the same time, so that the two of them peeled away from the shopkeeper and stumbled backwards. Tad was right behind him, ready to drop on top of the guy once Greg had him down. Tad wasn’t heavy, but a knee in the diaphragm and one in the groin ought to keep the lunatic out of action for a while.  Not a bad plan. It would leave Greg free to disarm him, then make sure the first guy stayed out of action while the shopkeeper called for help

Only the first guy, reeling from the blow to the head, didn’t stay down. He lurched to his hands and knees and tried crawling for the door, only he got tangled in the twisting bodies. Greg tripped on an outstretched arm, twisted too far over, and he landed on his back, the man with the knife on top of him.

And the man with the knife was already wrenching himself away, already raising the knife against this new obstacle, already bringing his arm down in the wide, fast, downward arc towards the face of his enemy.

But Tad was already moving too. Already dropping to a crouch and launching his own slight weight at the much heavier man with the knife, knowing he’d hardly throw the guy off centre, let alone topple him.  Already seeing the trajectory of the knife, aligning with Greg’s left eye, and there was no time to plan or plot, only to _do_ , and Tad was small but he was fast, and his hands were strong, and it was a bad, bad, _bad_ idea, but trying to defy physics to dislodge the bastard wasn’t going to work, and doing nothing was an even worse idea than the one he had, so _hell, hell, hell, here goes_ …

Tad barrelled shoulder-first into the solid wall of enraged human in front of him and he reached past the wall of chest and up to meet the downward thrust, deliberately shoving his hand between the blade and its target. Tad kept pushing against gravity and steel and the downward momentum of the meaty shoulder jarring into his chest and the screaming pain in his hand because _Greg_ , because his colleague, because his _friend_ , because **_no_** …!

Greg, underneath the two men, shoved up, shoved over, and he snatched up the cricket bat that had skittered over the counter top . The perp shrieked blue murder and moved viciously, and Tad screamed. Snarled. Jabbed his free hand, fingers pressed together like a blade of flesh, into the bastard’s throat, into that nerve point next to the artery. (Proving he’d been paying attention during all those self-defence classes those crazy Holmes brothers insisted that all the kids in their circle learn.)

The bastard howled and released the knife.

Tad scuttled backwards at speed and with a high whimpering sound.

Greg raised the bat, ready to subdue as required, but the knife-wielder was a sprawled mess on the floor, croaking and crying with the pain, and the crawler had stopped crawling and had thrown his arms over his head, begging for mercy.

“Call the police,” Greg barked at the shop owner, “And an ambulance.” He darted a quick look at Tad.

The smaller man sat on the floor, his back pressed against the refrigerator, his skin white and shiny as candlewax. His right hand was curled around his left, cradling it. A jack knife pierced that hand, right through the palm and out the other side. Blood was pouring from the open wound.

“Anderson?”

Tad hissed breath in and out past his gritted teeth. He blinked. He seemed not to have heard.

“Taddy?” said Greg again, “How is it?”

Tad’s breath started coming in ragged gasps, but his eyes regained focus. He shifted his hand slightly, as through trying to both see and not see the damage.

Greg saw it though, the ragged hole in which the knife was embedded. A wound made when the perp had twisted the knife in the flesh, breaking bones and tendons and muscle and _holy fuck_ , what a mess.

 _That was nearly my eye_ , thought Greg, _that was nearly my **death**._

The cops responding to the call arrived a minute later. Just as well. The twitchy knife guy had started to recover and looked like trying to make a run for it. Greg had been looking forward to having an excuse to break his fucking arm with the cricket bat. It was probably for the best that the temptation be removed.

The shop keeper – Mr Hussain, it transpired – had been seeing to Tad, as far as he was able. He’d placed his own coat around Tad’s shoulders to keep him warm, and gently wrapped Tad’s ruined and bleeding hand in several towels.

“It’s going to be okay, Tad,” Greg said, crouching down beside Anderson as the thieves were taken away and the paramedics took over Tad’s care.

“You okay?” Tad asked, his voice shaky. He’d asked this question four times already, as though he couldn’t quite believe his stupid plan had worked. Not that it was a plan. It had certainly been stupid. But had it worked?

“I’m fine, Tad,” Greg assured him for the fifth time, “It worked. You got him.”

“He w’s… goin’ to…” Blood loss and pain were making him woozy.

“I know. You stopped him. Thank you.”

“S’okay,” Tad managed a wobbly grin just as they loaded his trolley into the ambulance, “’S what frien’s do, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Greg agreed, pretty wobbly himself, “You go on ahead,” he said, as though that wasn’t going to happen with or without his say-so, “I’ll let Charlotte know you’re okay.”

Then the doors closed and the ambulance pulled away.  Greg climbed into the squad car, leaving his own locked and parked outside the off-licence, and phoned Molly.

At the Lestrade home, where people were gathering for the twins’ celebrations, Molly listened intently to her husband, took a sharp breath and then took charge. She took Tad’s wife Charlotte aside, told her:  ‘First up, Tad is alive and he’s going to be fine’. It was a terrible way to start a conversation, but was perhaps the best of the terrible ways to start one.

Molly then left instructions for her sons to look after the guests, and drove the shaking Charlotte to the hospital.

Tad and Charlotte’s girls, the youngest of the tribe of Collared’s children at twelve and ten, were bewildered and distressed, so Violet cajoled Chris and David into spending their eighteenth birthday teaching everyone basic anatomy.  They encouraged Nicola and Teresa to draw all over Ford with a black marker pen (not the first time this sort of thing had happened in this extended family). Ford willingly sacrificed his body to education and redrew some of the lines he was not happy with.

Then Sherlock and John got involved and they ended up drawing more lines on Sherlock once he’d taken his shirt off. His pale skin was excellent for showing the finer details, and John applied himself diligently to mapping out major arterial and nerve groups.  Mary and Nirupa called out encouragement from the sidelines.

Eventually, they ended up singing complicated versions of ‘the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone’ with extra verses to cover organs, blood vessels and digestive processes made up as required.

Really, as birthday celebrations for the kids went, anatomy lessons in marker pen on live test subjects followed by ludicrous songs was pretty typical, except that two sets of parents were not around for it.

Molly and Greg returned with both cars a few hours later, with news that Tad was out of surgery. Later, after everyone else had gone home, Greg drove back to the hospital to collect Charlotte and then took her and the girls home.

Not the birthday they’d have wished for their boys, but at the end of it, they still had their father, and their father still had his friend. It could have been a lot worse.

**

Greg and Molly arrived at the hospital mid Sunday morning. Molly came in first to kiss Tad’s forehead.

“Thank you,” she said, tears prickling in her eyes, “Greg told me how you… you saved him and, god, Tad, I’m so sorry about your hand, it looks… I mean… I’m sure it’ll mend, I…”

Tad blinked at her. “It’s okay, Molly,” he said quietly, “You don’t have to pretend. I know it’s bad. I’m a bloody scientist. Forensics. I know a bit about injuries like this.”

“Oh, but they can do so much now,” Molly protested, “Artificial bones and all the…” She petered out, because she knew that the science wasn’t quite as good as the complex tissues of the human hand, and she knew that he knew. She smiled uncertainly and patted his leg through the blanket. “Anything we can do, we’ll do it. You know that, don’t you?”

Tad smiled wanly but genuinely. “Yeah.  I know.”

Molly glanced at Greg, then insisted on taking Charlotte out with the girls for a break in the canteen.

Greg sat down next to Tad’s bed, and for a minute they looked at each other.

“That was incredibly brave, what you did,” said Greg after a moment.

Tad shrugged. “Not really,” he said, “There just weren’t many options.”

“Well. Thank you anyway. For not leaving it to the other options.”

Tad swallowed uncomfortably; nodded sharply. “No problem.”

They sat in an awkward English silence for a moment until Greg cleared his throat and said: “Don’t think that this gets you out of the fiver you owe me.”

Tad barked a sudden laugh. “Photographic evidence?”

Greg fished out his phone and called up the images of Sherlock and Ford covered in anatomical notations made with a marker pen.

“I was sure it was John’s turn to be inappropriate at a birthday party,” Tad grumbled, “He hasn’t sworn in front of the kids since Christmas. He’s got to break soon.”

“To be fair,” Greg said, “Mary says that Violet started the ‘let’s draw anatomy on people’ festival this time. Maybe I should let you off.”

“Nah,” said Tad, grinning, “I’m good for a fiver. Especially if it takes him three days to scrub that off, like it did last time.”

Tad spent the week in hospital having a series of operations. Operations were scheduled to continue for the next few months, on and off. Reconstructive surgery would have to take place in stages, while the bones healed, and his body learned to accept the artificial membranes to replace his shredded tendons.

One thing was clear from early on. Tad’s left hand was never going to regain full function. He couldn’t close his hand. He couldn’t grip a fork properly, let alone a drum stick.

Some of his many visitors tried to reassure him on this point: some of his students and fellow teachers. They thought they were doing the right thing, encouraging him, telling him it’d be fine.

Not his close friends, though. Not Molly, or Sally, or even Charlotte. That tight-knit group, the Collared crowd and his wonderful wife, they always told it like it was. They tried to be gentle about it, mostly.

Well, apart from Sherlock, of course. Tad was strangely glad that Sherlock told it exactly like it was without dressing it up. John was kinder, engaging his actually quite soothing bedside manner, but Sherlock just cut to the chase.

“Mycroft has already engaged the best surgeons on this,” Sherlock said, “But the prognosis is that you’ll never regain full use of the hand. The pain will pass, but the function won’t get much better than it is now.”

“Sherlock!” John admonished him.

“Well, it won’t.”

“Thanks, though. For trying. For getting the best to try,” Tad replied quietly _.  Sherlock had asked Mycroft to get the best surgeons. Sherlock had… given a damn_. Tad found the notion unsettling. As did Sherlock, apparently.

Sherlock huffed uncomfortably, claimed to be bored and that his brain was atrophying in the face of so much tedium, and stormed out to get on with an important experiment involving iodine, a calcified toenail and sheep’s blood.

Tad watched him go, then found John watching him. “I’m sorry about the band, John.”

John shook his head at him. “Don’t worry about that, Tad. What’s important is that you mend and get back home.”

Tad continued to look worried anyway. “You realise… I don’t think I’ll be able to play again. I mean…” he held up his bandaged hand, splinted straight, but his fingers curved into stiffened claws. “They don’t think…”

John carefully took Tad’s hand and lowered it to the bed. “I know. I’m sorry. I know how much playing means to you.”

“It’s not that,” said Tad, although it was that. Partly. “I just… I guess… you’ll need…”

“Tad, stop.” John gave him a piercing look, and Tad squirmed a little. John was looking at him the way Sherlock usually looked at people. The way Tad Anderson had spent almost twenty years now, trying to learn how to look at people. Trying to learn how to read them.

John took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and gave Tad a look that combined exasperation and affection in equal measure. Tad didn’t know what to make of it.

“After all these years, Tad Anderson, you cannot tell me you think our friendship is held together solely by the fact that you play drums in our band.”

“Of course not.” _Isn’t it?_

“It’s how we got to know each other better, but it’s not why we’re friends. It’s not even why we started to be friends.”

Tad opened his mouth to say something, but failed to think of any words. He closed his mouth again.

“Tad,” said John solemnly, “When Sherlock was missing and everyone thought he’d died a failure and a fake, you did one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen someone do.”

Tad blinked, trying to think what it was he’d done.

“You changed your mind,” John supplied into the void, “You decided you’d been wrong, and you changed your mind, and you apologised. To me, to start with. And then you fought for him. You fought for Sherlock when everyone thought he was dead and disgraced, because it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t easy, and I know it caused you a lot of trouble at the beginning, especially with Sally. But you did that, and it made so much difference to me. You have no idea what that meant to me, Tad, how much I needed someone else to believe. And it was brave. Braver even than what you did for Greg on Saturday, I think.”

Tad’s mouth opened and closed once more.

“Look at you now, twenty years on. You worked so hard, you got so much better at your job, developing those checklists and breaking down what a _genius_ does so that ordinary mortals can try to do it too.  And now you teach deductive reasoning at the Agency. So, just in case you missed it, which it actually looks like you have: I'm proud to call you my friend, Thaddeus Anderson. I’ve been proud of you for years."

A third goldfish impersonation ended with Tad blinking rapidly and clearing his throat like he’d swallowed a bug.  John, despite living with Sherlock Holmes for twenty years, was not completely out of practice with awkward English silences.  He rose and patted Tad on the shoulder. “I’ll just go get you a cup of tea, then, will I?”  
  
“Yes,” Tad managed around a convulsive swallow, “Yes please.”

Six months later, when Tad was presented with an award for bravery for his actions in saving Greg Lestrade’s life during an armed robbery, he was even less articulate, despite the prepared speech.

His left hand, as predicted, was always a little warped thereafter and he couldn’t hold or use a drum stick properly. Nobody had much time for the band these days anyway, it was true, and that made Tad a bit sad. He’d loved Collared. Maybe of all of them he’d loved it the most. But while he missed drumming, and missed playing even in a backyard garage with the gang, he had new things now. Better, lasting things, and he still had the best thing the band had ever given him.

He still had his friends and – how had he missed till now that he had this? – his friends’ respect.

 


	23. Don't Go Changing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (This story proved to be a bugger to write, partly because it required two different narrative styles. Turned out to be a bit of a metaphor, really.)
> 
> John and Mary tried living together once. They tried really, really hard. They loved one another, those two, and respected one another. They were great friends as well as passionate lovers and they loved being together.
> 
> Just, it turned out, not all the time.
> 
> Luckily, they realised this in time – before they ruined everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are. Other subtitles are random, but some are from Sting's If You Love Someone, Set the Free, and text from canon.

**1.** **Good intentions**

John Watson and Mary Morstan tried living together once. They tried very, very hard.

With the best of intentions, they decided, a year into their relationship, that they should live together. John was often away at crime scenes with Sherlock, and Mary was usually off to foreign locales with Nirupa to empower communities and build useful things like roads and bridges and schools. So, when it looked like Mary was actually going to be in London for a good long stretch, they thought, yes, let’s live together. We miss each other so much. We’ll love seeing each other every spare minute we have. It’ll be _fantastic._

And if the first week was a bit awkward, well, they were still getting used to the idea.

And if the second week was still a bit strange, well, they had both been independent adults for a long time, so of course it was going to take a while to adjust to living with each other rather than Sherlock and Nirupa, respectively.

And if the stupid arguments about stupid things got worse at the start of the second month instead of better, that just showed they were strong, stubborn people, both set in their ways and this was maybe going to take more patience and understanding than they’d at first realised. _Fine_. That was just the way of things. They were going to make this work if it _killed_ them.

The fact was that, while they were mad about each other, living together was not the breeze they’d imagined it would be. They fought often, over ridiculous things, half of which they couldn't even remember the next day. They'd end up apologising, intensely, with their hearts and tongues and bodies, when they couldn't even recall the offence, or why they'd been so agitated. The make-up sex was, frankly, fantastic, like all the rest of the sex they had. And they had lots of terrific sex.

But they had lots and lots of less than terrific fights, too. It was not ideal.

They loved one another, those two, and respected one another. They were great friends as well as passionate lovers and they loved being together.

Just, it turned out, not all the time.

Luckily, they realised this in time – before they ruined everything.

 

**2.** **Flatmates Should Know the Worst About Each Other  
** **(or, Some important information about John Watson)**

Many people who knew Sherlock Holmes thought that John Watson was a saint for putting up with that demanding, inconsiderate, unsociable and sometimes downright unhygienic flatmate of his. John used to smile tightly when people expressed this opinion. Sometimes he told them that when he was looking for a flatmate, way back when, what he had said to Mike Stamford was: _Who would want to share a flat with **me**?_

Let’s face it. People didn’t realise how hard John Watson could be to live with because, next to Sherlock Holmes, he looked like the normal one.

He really wasn’t.

For example, John spent way too much time in the shower. Sometimes it was just because he could. The army didn’t generally offer such luxuries, and especially not out in a desert war zone.

Sometimes it was because he woke up from nightmares of blood and bone and sand sticking to his skin, and he’d have to wash and wash and wash until he’d scrubbed the ghost-sensation of it away.

But mostly, it was because he just needed a calm, quiet place to be for a while: morning, afternoon, evening, once or twice in the middle of the night, when the need came, like a kind of itch. It was an old habit. After his mother died, and his father became a drunkard, and his sister followed close behind, and there wasn’t anywhere for him to run to, teenaged John often spent long hours in the privacy and warmth of a long, hot shower. Cocooning. Finding solace and peace. Finding equilibrium.

Using up all the hot water.

Sherlock never seemed to notice or mind this, but Mrs Hudson was known to berate John on occasion. He would stand there, in his bathrobe, pink as a piglet, agreeing with her that it was not a good thing to do. He did it anyway.

That was one thing he and Mary fought about, fairly often. Mary hated cold showers.

John had other bad habits. While he was stringently tidy in some areas, like the first aid supplies, the edible contents of the fridge, and his gun, in other areas he was much less fastidious. He and Sherlock had that in common, although a Venn diagram on where they liked order to exist barely overlapped.  But they managed, mostly because the areas on which neither cared about the tidiness of things – papers left strewn about, clothing flung on whatever bit of furniture or floor was handy at the time of divestment – overlapped considerably.

The Venn diagram he had with Mary showed a good overlap of the thing they liked tidy, but his capacity for unruliness was much, much larger than hers. It drove her bonkers.

There was also John’s tendency to supply a commentary while watching the television. It had started in the army, where he developed a taste for talking all the way through stupid, loud action films, because people were always coming in late to the rec room and he’d have to catch people up on the plot-so-far, until it got to the point where he might as well just make snarky commentary from start to finish. It got to be kind of fun. (John once got into an almighty fistfight at a base in Afghanistan because of his penchant for editorialising during a film that someone else was keen to see. John won that fight by default when someone else got fed up and stuck a boot through the television. The three of them had ended up brawling and then getting good and fucking drunk together. Good times.)

When John moved into Baker Street, he and Sherlock talked and argued all the way through any and every film or show John ever watched. Snarky commentary was not only fun, but necessary as a counterpoint to Sherlock’s own pithy and hilariously aggravated observations. All part of the entertainment. Well, unless you were Mary, and actually liked to _watch the film_.

And another thing. John had a foul temper in the mornings. He never was a morning person, though he trained himself to be one, first at medical school and then in the army. He never trained himself to like it, though.

His lack of morning cheer was not helped by the nightmares he still hads from time to time. He didn’t like to talk about the nightmares. Sherlock never asked him to. Sherlock had worked out early on what was in them (and the one that Sherlock’s leap from St Barts had added to the mix) and never, ever asked John if he was all right, or if he wanted to talk, or any of that. Instead, Sherlock would play his violin or, since his return from the Year in Hell, he would sometimes crawl fully dressed into John’s bed. Conversely, when Sherlock’s own nightmares were making sleep hell, John would play his guitar, or they’d make music together, or he’d crawl into Sherlock’s bed and they’d just be company for each other.

Mary tried, very hard, to be that anchor for John. She didn’t know about John and Sherlock’s platonic sleeping arrangements on the bad nights, and even if she’d known, they wouldn’t have been an issue. But she was never able to provide the right kind of comfort for John when he woke, chest heaving, panic clawing his spine and belly.

And finally – mornings weren’t the only time John got in a bad mood. He got in bad moods after hearing from his sister. He got in bad moods at stupid comments about Sherlock in the media. He got in bad moods at a half dozen other, less obvious things. Basically, John was a moody bastard at times. When he was a teenager he wrote angry songs. Now he was _a bona fide_ grown-up he managed his moods much better, but he still got them. Dark hours and black days. But never on days when he was doing the stupid, crazy things he did with Sherlock.

One reason was that Sherlock could out-flounce and out-brood John coming and going, which John found entertaining (except when it was pissing him off). But mainly it was because Sherlock pulled John out of most of his dark moods by offering better uses for John’s restless energy. Mad races across London. Fist fights with bad guys. Jamming in the flat, making an unholy racket with guitar and violin, and singing at the top of their lungs.

When you came down to it, John was a bit of a chameleon. Sherlock discovered that on the very first day they met, and the conviction only grew the longer they knew each other. John was a follower, but also a leader. He was quiet and controlled, but capable of the most stunning, focused outbreaks of violence in what he considered a righteous cause. He seemed an ordinary kind of fellow, but he craved excitement. He was pretty non-judgemental about people’s foibles, but if you threatened an innocent, or someone he held dear, just watch the speed with which he both judged and carried out sentence, if he deemed it necessary.

John Watson was a mass of contradictions, and Sherlock Holmes was the first person who ever saw every single facet of him and accepted every one.

Mary was the second, but although she could accept every part of who John was, that didn’t necessarily mean she was well suited to accommodating those facets on a day to day basis.

No one person can be everything to another person, even if they want to. No matter how hard they try. Mary could no more be everything John would ever need than Sherlock could be. No more than John could be everything for Mary.

 **3.      You Can't Control An Independent Heart**  
          **(or, Some important information about Mary Morstan)**

Mary knew better than to try to be every last little thing to John. That didn’t mean that she didn’t want to give him as much as she could. But there were areas where they were just not compatible.

There were several things people often didn’t realise about Mary.

Mary, despite a childhood that was in many ways suffocating, had always had the stories of her father to breathe air into her closeted world. By nature, she was an optimistic and cheerful soul. By temperament she was vivacious and fun to be with.

However, like John Watson, Mary Morstan also had many contradictory character traits. Like the fact that she was both a bit controlling and a bit freewheeling about her own life choices.

Mary grew up with contrasting and competing role models. Her father was an adventurer. He couldn’t help it. He was an archaeologist and spent a lot of time in the field being, well, less than conventional. A real Indiana Jones type. He gallivanted around the wide world, with his best friend, Paul Sholto, a linguist. They loved getting into strife until the strife, one day, got into them. They died in Kashmir in a military ambush as the result of mistaken identity. The soldiers had been looking for bandits. The bandits had been shooting at the soldiers. Morstan and Sholto were caught fatally in the middle.

If Morstan had taken Mary with him on his adventures, who knew how their lives might have turned out. But that had never really been on the cards. Instead, Mary was raised by her mother and, after her parents’ divorce when she was four years old, by her mother and stepfather. Both of whom decided that strict, humourless, joyless discipline was what a wayward child like Mary needed.

They were wrong. Even at five years old, Mary knew they were wrong. Hopelessly wrong. But it was a very long time before she was able to do anything about it. She fled from that grey, suffocating home as soon as she possibly could, which was when she was sixteen. She stayed with her Gran, her father’s mother, until she finished high school, and then she got assistance from the university and lived in a share house and worked part time while she studied engineering.

Mary was tough; much tougher than she looked. She was disciplined and intelligent and liked to know exactly what was going on, and where, and when. This trait was the result of a restrictive childhood and served her well in her career.

But Mary also loved defying those expectations. She loved having everything planned down to the finest detail and then haring off on some spontaneous tangent, using all the facts at hand and then thinking on the fly. She loved the freedom of it.

When she met Nirupa, at one of Mary’s first jobs in southern India, and they took off one weekend to see where the local bus took them (no plans, just wanting to see) they just clicked. From then on, they went off on wild escapades together at every opportunity, and not always opportunities convenient to the construction company. Luckily, she was much too good at her job for them to fire her.

However, Mary liked doing those things on _her_ terms. When _she_ was ready. She swore when she was thirteen years old that she was never going to let herself be trapped again – by another person, by ideology, by fear, by ignorance or gender or the clothes she wore or because of _anything_. Since turning sixteen, Mary Morstan never has been trapped like that again.

Nirupa D’Souza was the perfect best friend for Mary. Nirupa was extraordinarily talented in her field of anthropology, a genius in many ways in the breadth and depth of her knowledge and understanding. She spoke a dozen languages (and was studying at least one other new one at any given time).  Many people thought Nirupa was the one in charge, that she put the brakes on Mary’s sometimes wild behaviour, but that wasn’t at all true. Mary controlled the brakes _and_ the accelerator. Nirupa never stopped her, no matter how crazy the idea. Nirupa looked like the serious one, the one in charge, but she most definitely wasn’t. Good god, no. Nirupa adored Mary’s craziness. Mary, in her way, set Nirupa free as well.

Nirupa D’Souza saw the wildness in her disciplined friend, and loved it, and nurtured it, and ran with it, because she knew in a way that even Mary didn’t realise for a long time that any attempt to curtail Mary’s freedom, her ability to run when she needed to, her choice to break her own routines whenever she saw fit – any attempt at that, and Mary would start to shrivel up and die.

And while John Watson never, ever tried to steal Mary’s freedom from her, the fact was that living in a nice little flat in a nice part of London with a nice office job and a nice salary was never going to come to much for Mary, not matter how unconventional her boyfriend turned out to be.

  **4.      If You Love Something, Set It Free**  
  


John sat at the breakfast table in his bathrobe, hunched unhappily over a mug of cooling tea. His skin was still faintly flushed from the heat of the too-long shower, but somehow he still didn’t feel warm.

This wasn’t turning out the way he’d expected it to. The way he’d wanted it to. This wasn’t turning out right _at all_.

He heard Mary stop in the kitchen doorway. He maintained his miserable eye-contact with the tea.

“You used up all the hot water again,” she said. Her tone was weary rather than accusatory, which surprised him.

“Sorry,” he said, and he was.

Mary sighed. John listened to her footsteps as she padded towards him in her slippers. He was surprised when he leaned over to kiss his forehead.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” she said, “I know you had a bad night.” Her fingers followed her lips, tracing the lines of his furrowed brow.

John closed his eyes. “Sorry.”

"Nothing to be sorry for." Mary kissed his forehead again, pulled up a chair and sat beside him. Finally, John dragged his eyes away from his untouched tea to meet her gaze.

“I have a lot to be sorry for, Mary. I don’t know why this isn’t working. I don’t…”

“I think I do,” she said.

And they paused in that moment, apprehensive, looking at each other with loss already welling up behind their eyes, as though this was already goodbye.

“I love you,” said John, hoping it would stave off that awful moment.

“And I love you,” said Mary, a rueful smile curving her lips, “And this isn’t the end, John Watson. Not a bit of it. So get that idea right out of your head, you idiot.”

John swallowed hard. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so. I honestly don’t.”

“What is it, then?”

Mary placed her hands over John’s, which he realised were clenched on top of the table.

“It’s two people who love each other deciding to find out what works for them, rather than trying to do what works for other people.”

He swallowed again, but this time there was a ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth – because this time he believed her. This wasn’t the end. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that.

“You didn’t have dreams like that when you lived at Baker Street,” Mary said.

“I did,” he countered, “On and off. But…” he shrugged awkwardly, “They seem to come more often here. I don’t know why. I’m sor…”

“Don’t, John. I’ve told you. You have no reason to be sorry. It’s who you are.”

“I don’t want it to be who I am. I’m more than nightmares and PTSD,” he protested, irritation rising to anger, but then he subsided again at the look on her face. Patience and sweetness, but also that sardonic arch of the eyebrow; that ‘I’m not finished’ glint in her eye.

“I don’t mean the dreams. I mean… everything. The hot water and the talking over the telly and the crankiness.” She grinned as she listed his worst sins, as though she found them endearing rather than absolutely crazy-making. “And all the wonderful things too. The kindness and the humour, and the way you make tea, and that fabulous thing you do with your tongue…” They both laughed at that. “You are who you are, John, and I love you for all of it. And this…this is who I am. Impatient and bossy and contrary.”

“And funny and smart and brilliant.”

“Those too, yes.” They were grinning at each other, and Mary reached out to cup his cheek in her hand. He turned his face to kiss her palm.

“Do you know why this doesn’t work, John? Because it isn’t about whether or not we love each other. It’s about who we are, every part of us, our baggage as well as what we choose to be. And the truth is…”

Mary paused, her expression uncertain now.

“Tell me the truth, then, Mary.”

“The truth is that I love you, but I feel trapped. Not by you,” she hastened to add, “You don’t try to control me, you don’t do anything wrong. It’s just this… this. Domesticity. The little home. I’m awful at it. It’s not your fault, but I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“I…see.”

“And I think… I think you feel lost, here. Unsafe.”

John wanted to deny it, but his jaw wouldn’t unclench. He couldn’t tell her she was wrong. She looked at him with large, worried eyes and finally he drew in a breath and frowned.

“It’s not that I don’t feel _un_ safe. It’s just I don’t… I don’t…”

“It’s all right,” said Mary, “I know.”

“I feel… wrong,” John said at last, “I don’t know how else to put it. When I was at Baker Street, it felt right. I belonged. I wasn’t broken any more. I was strong. Free.”

The anguished expression on his face was mirrored on hers. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, to his mouth, and he kissed her back, but for that moment it felt like goodbye again.

“I wanted to feel like that here,” John said against Mary’s skin, and his breath hitched, though he never cried. Never.

“And I wanted to feel free here,” she said, her own tears falling unheeded, “I wanted that. I wanted to be like other, normal couples. But you know something?” She pulled back, her face wet, but her mouth smiling. “John Hamish Watson, you and I are not normal people. We do not have normal lives.”

John managed to snort at that one. “That we do not,” he agreed.

Mary wiped her face with the heels of her hands, pulled her back straight and looked her beloved in the eye.

“In conclusion, John, who the fuck cares what ‘normal’ is?. It’s just a word other people use to describe what’s common, what’s expected. But we’re not other people. Who we are and how we love and how we live is up to us to decide.”

John, chin raised, eyes clear as he looked at her, gave a tiny but definite nod. “Go on.”

“We shouldn’t be living together because we think we should want it. We know who we are and we know how we feel. We can do this our own way.”

“And what way is that?”

“The way we were before. You at Baker Street, me with Rupe. The lives we love, and you and me seeing each other whenever we can, whenever we want. But it doesn’t have to be this, just because that’s what normal people do.”

“That… makes sense.”

“It does,” Mary agreed, grinning. “So if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to formalise this arrangement.”

“Yes?” One eyebrow was raised in query, but that expectant smile was tugging at one side of his mouth, as it was wont to do.

“John Watson, will you continue to have a mad, passionate affair with me, on our own terms rather than society’s, for as long as we both shall live?”

“Gladly, Mary Morstan. With all my heart.”

“Excellent. Let’s call Rupe and Sherlock and tell them the good news.”

“Christ, yes,” John said, reaching for his phone, recharging on the sideboard, “Sherlock’s been pretending not to be in a sulk ever since I moved out.”

“That is him pretending not to be in a sulk?”

“I know. Tragic, isn’t it?”

“Explains why he and Rupe have spent so much time together in the last two months. He’s been trying to pick up tips from her. She’s only marginally better at it.” Mary grabbed her phone from the bookshelf where she’d left it and held it to her ear.

John laughed. “God, look at the four of us. Idiots all.”

“True.” Mary kissed him. “At least we have an excuse. The geniuses should know better.”

“And yet… hi, Sherlock!”

Mary left him to it as her own call was answered. “Rupe, it’s me! Sorry I woke you,” she warbled into the phone, utterly unrepentant.

Sherlock’s voice at the end of John’s phone was light and even, and unless you were John Watson you’d have thought he was unmoved to be hearing from his former flatmate. But he’d answered the phone instead of letting it go to message, and so John knew better.

“So, have you let my room out yet?” John asked.

“Not yet. Everyone is tedious. A man from Birmingham who came through last week was slightly less tedious, I suppose. He’s a taxidermist. He murdered his mother recently, though, so I don’t suppose he’ll get the chance to move in.”

John laughed. “Well, get onto that and get him arrested, and failing that, tell him he’s out of luck. I’m coming back home.”

“Does this mean you expect me to clean out the fridge?”

“I know there’s no such hope. Do we have any milk, though?”

“Mrs Hudson will get some in. When shall I send her to the shop?”

John looked at Mary, who was laughing into the phone as well and saying: “Not another fight, no. Kind of the opposite of that.” She saw John looking at her, smiled, and wiggled her arse provocatively at him.

“I’ll pack a bag this afternoon,” John said, “It’ll take a couple of days to get everything sorted, but I’ll be home tonight.”

There was a moment’s silence and then Sherlock finally thought to ask: “Have you broken up with Mary?”

“Not a bit of it,” John said, “Kind of the opposite.” The tip of his tongue emerged, swiped over his bottom lip, then peeped out enticingly at his top lip. Mary slid into his lap and kissed his neck.

“I’ll explain this afternoon,” said john, “See you at Speedy’s at two.”

He hung up and flung the phone aside just as Mary said, “Speedy’s at two, Rupe, we’ll tell you all about it.” Her phone joined John’s somewhere on the sideboard.

“God, John,” Mary murmured, reaching for the knot in his bathrobe belt, “You’ve got a wicked tongue.”

He spent the next hour putting it to good use while they had the best not-breaking-up, not-living-together sex anyone had ever had in the history of the world.

  **5.** **This I Promise From The Heart**

Not living together worked much better for John and Mary than living together.

Until Mary fell pregnant, and she and John wanted, they _really wanted_ , to both be there full time for their daughter.

They tried. They really, really tried.

And then they figured out that it didn’t matter how much they loved each other, they just couldn’t live together, and the way they were when they tried was not the environment they wanted for Violet. It’s not the home they wanted for her.

Instead, after three weeks, they went back to what worked and then made some new changes.

They saw each other, and Violet, every day that they could.

Violet spent blocks of her week at Baker Street, where the inhabitants learned the basics of parenthood with consummate skill. The rest of the week, she taught Mary and Nirupa the same.

Mary and John made sure they had video conference paraphernalia, computer tablets, audio equipment, every technical means at their disposal to ensure that Violet heard the voices of each of her parents (and four of them cheerfully claimed the honour) every day of her life. Money was spent freely on airfares rather than fripperies like new shoes and meals other than beans on toast so that Mary could fly to London, or John to wherever Mary and Violet were, at least one weekend a month.

John and Mary missed each other when Mary was overseas, and they missed Violet terribly whenever she was with the other parent, but they made it work. They made sure that Violet was surrounded by people who were where they wanted to be, and happy, and loving, and supported and supportive, who did not feel trapped or broken. John and Mary found the way to be all of who they were as individuals as well as who they were as a couple.

This is what worked for them, and so it's what they did.

Outsiders often wondered whether it worked for Violet. So did Violet, for a short while, when she was a teenager, at the age when you question everything.

But when she finished questioning, Violet’s conclusion was this.

There is more than one kind of love, and more than one way to love, and as long as everyone knows they’re loved, and that there is always someone to turn to, and someone who needs you, then who cared whether you were ‘normal’ or ‘strange’ or ‘unconventional’.

Love, and making sure you expressed that love, Violet concluded, really was all you need.

 


	24. Lay All Your Love On Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Violet Morstan Watson is afraid of almost nothing. Almost. There's one thing that makes her too afraid to act.
> 
> What if this ruins everything?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from the ABBA song of the same name.

Violet Morstan Watson sat on the stoop in the morning sunlight, her back pressed against the door jamb, a glass of fresh mint tea in one hand. Her other arm was wrapped around her middle, hugging her own ribs, while she gazed out on the street.

The unsealed road was dusty and grimy and gloriously lively. Chickens scratched in the dirt. A rangy, moth-eaten cat trotted past on its secret business. A mongrel dog lifted its head to watch the cat’s progress but decided it was too hot to make sport with it today. Two houses away, a gaggle of small, squealing children was chasing a rag ball and each other. Violet had played a similar game when she was small, over a decade ago, the last time her mother and Nirupa had been working in this part of Africa.

Uncomplicated times, she thought yearningly. Then she smiled ruefully. Her times had always been either terribly complicated or terribly simple, and she was never sure which something was until later. Hers had been an unconventional upbringing. It always made perfect sense to her at the time. It was only when she’d turned 15 that it had struck her how strange her life was. The realisation had made her uncomfortable and prickly, had made her shut out some of the most important people in her life.

Well, she’d got over that bit of stupidity. Maybe she’d get over this one. Maybe if she persevered, everything would uncomplicate itself again.

Maybe.

“Hey, kiddo,” Nirupa emerged from the coolness of the house interior and folded her long limbs down next to Violet on the steps, “Penny for them?”

Violet sighed. “You don’t want to know.”

“Of course I want to know, Vi,” Nirupa said, frowning, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Don’t try to lie to an anthropologist. I’m an expert in human nature and body language.”

Violet sighed. “You and Sherlock are impossible sometimes.”

“Thank you.”

Violet snorted a laugh. “God, you two. Do you know what it was like growing up and never getting away with anything, no matter whose house you were living in?”

“No, but I’ve observed the effects. It’s made you develop a strange combination of ruthless honesty and rat cunning.”

Violet’s laugh was more genuine then.

“Is it something at university?”

Violet shook her head. “No, that’s all good. All great. I’m loving it. I’m almost sorry to be graduating soon. But not actually sorry. I can’t wait to start my internship.”

“Is it… love trouble?”

“Not at uni, no.” Violet pressed her lips together. She hadn’t meant it to come out like that.

“Ah.”

“Don’t ‘ah’ me, Rupe. It’s… “ but she didn’t have the words yet to say what it was, except ‘complicated’. Why did it have to be _so complicated_?

“Tell me about it.”

Violet sighed. She took a sip of her tea and, with her hand curled around the warm glass, held the radiating heat of it close to her throat, as though that would make it easier to speak.

“Can I ask you a question,  Rupe?”

“Sure.”

“Were you… are you…?”  She pressed the glass against her lips and inhaled the scent of mint leaves, seeking calmness or courage. “You don’t’ have to answer if you don’t want to, okay, but… were you ever in love with Mum?”

“You know I love her, as much as I love you.”

“I know. I don’t mean…’ do you love her?’ I mean… were you ever _in love_ with her?”

Nirupa was very, very still. She studied Violet’s face, and Violet flinched.  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have… don’t…”

“I was,” said Nirupa, “When I first met her. I fell desperately in love with her.”

“Oh.”

“But Mary… loved me like a sister. She wasn’t _in_ love with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Nirupa raised a sad smile, but then it transformed, softened, became warm and wistful. “She knew, I think, but we didn’t talk about it. She’s straight. She loved me but she didn’t fancy me. After a while the infatuation passed.”

“A while?”

“Three or so years.” Nirupa’s smile broadened. “Love can change, you know. It’s not always the same kind of love. One day I woke up and realised I wasn’t pining for her kiss any more. I was happy. Happy with my life, with spending my life with the best friend I could ever have. We didn’t have to be kissing, or having sex, or any of that, to mean everything to each other.  Mary is part of my life, and part of me. Maybe if we’d been lovers, we wouldn’t have what we have now. We wouldn’t have _you_ , now, would we? We grew into this instead. And it’s good. It’s not _less_. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out. I get to have the _best_ best friend, and she got to have you, which meant I did too, and I still get to have girlfriends on the side. It’s been a pretty perfect life.”

Violet nodded slowly. Maybe that was it. Maybe she just had to wait and let this pass. Grow out of it, and into something else.

“Of course, the opposite can also happen,” said Nirupa.

“The opposite?”

“Sometimes people can be friends for years and one day they wake up and they find that it’s grown into a different kind of love.”

“Oh.” That was not helpful. “And what if only one of you wakes up feeling like that?” Violet put down the cooling glass, closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyelids, trying to squeeze the tears back in.

“That would be hard,” agreed Nirupa. Violet felt Nirupa’s hand on her arm, stroking along the limb to curve her elegant fingers against Violet’s own. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about. He’s been in love with you for years.”

“No, he… _what_?”

“You didn’t see. He worked very hard not to let you see. He knew it wasn’t the same for you.”

Violet’s hands had dropped away and she was staring at Nirupa in horror. “No. He… we’re just friends. He’s practically my brother.”

“He’s not _actually_ your brother, though. It’s an important distinction.”

“But he… he doesn’t…” The words choked in her throat.

“Vi, honey, as Sherlock likes to say, you see but you don’t observe. But don’t feel bad. Ford was careful that you wouldn’t see.”

Nirupa’s words did not remove the stricken look from Violet’s face.

“Since when?”

“I suppose he was about seventeen when I noticed.”

“ _Seventeen_? He’s spent the last five years feeling like _this_?”

Nirupa frowned. “I thought this would be good news.”

“He… but… Ford… but… how do you _know_?”

“I’ve seen how he looks at you when you can’t see him.”

“But…”

“Wait there.” Nirupa rose and disappeared inside, returning a moment later with a digital photo frame. She fielded through a series of pictures then froze on one. It had been taken at Chloe’s birthday the previous year. The whole gang had gathered, managing by some minor miracle to all actually be in London at the same time for a change.

Chloe was standing on a chair, making a speech. Her twin brothers were heckling good-naturedly from the side. Teresa and Nicola were gazing up at Chloe with huge grins, and the various parents were ranged about the room, laughing. You could see the pride in Molly and Greg’s eyes, in how they looked at her, and how they held hands.  Violet was there, standing between John and Mary, hands half raised in what would soon turn into applause.

Everyone in the picture was looking at Chloe, smiling or laughing, ready to cheer the speech.

Everyone except Sherrinford Holmes.

Ford was looking at Violet, and his expression wasn’t sad or wistful. There was a little longing in his face, but mostly he seemed… content. Content to be there, to be seeing her.

Violet traced her fingers over the facsimile of Ford’s face. “Look at him. Isn’t he perfect?”

Nirupa smiled. “Yes, Violet, he’s perfect.”

“Look at how he’s looking at me.”

“Yes, I can see.”

“I’ve been extraordinarily stupid.”

“No, honey, you haven’t. Love just comes along slowly sometimes.”

“No, I’ve been stupid. Absolutely and heart-stoppingly moronic. I’ve been so worried that I could mess up our friendship. For years I’ve worried about it, and I never made a move, because I couldn’t see _this_. I was afraid of losing what I had and I never told him, because I thought he didn’t feel the same way. I’ve been dating people who look _nothing like him_ , thinking I could break the habit, but I’ve been in love with him for years, and look at this. I’ve made us both feel… the way I’ve been feeling… for _years_.   **Oh**!” The last was an explosive sound of annoyance. She rose sharply to her feet, thrusting the photo frame at Nirupa and striding into the house.

“Phone’s in the sitting room!” Nirupa called out after her, “There’s plenty of credit, and it’s five in the morning in London.”

“Perfect!” Violet called back.

Nirupa didn’t mean to eavesdrop, honestly, but it was hard not to. The walls were thin. And Nirupa was leaning in to the hallway, straining every nerve. So okay, she absolutely meant to eavesdrop.

“I know what time it is, Ford,” Violet was saying impatiently, “I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important. No, nobody’s hurt. Everyone’s fine. I just wanted to tell you I love you.  Yes.” A silence and then. “No, I mean _in love with you_ kind of love you.” Another long pause. “Yes, really. Absolutely. I adore you. I want to kiss the living breath out of you.” A pause and then laughter. “Seriously? Well, I suppose you can at that. Text me with your arrival time and we’ll come and get you. Yes. Yes. Yes yes yes yes. I love you.”

Nirupa was sitting more naturally looking out at the street and pretending she hadn’t heard a word when Violet pranced back to the stoop and dropped down beside her.

“Well,” she said, “That’s all right then.”

“Is it?”

“It’s semester break for him too. He’s getting a flight out to visit, today.” She looked a little stunned. “God, Rupe, _today_. He couldn’t wait a second longer.” Then her face lit up like the Milky Way, full of light and stars. “Ford’s coming here. Right away. He’s coming to me.”

“Good thing we have so many spare bedrooms, then.”

Violet grinned devilishly, then.

Nirupa rather suspected that Violet was planning how to use each and every one of them. She supposed she’d have to go out with Mary for a lot of long walks and shopping trips. Maybe take her dancing, teach her some local pop songs. Go to a movie.

Loving Mary, thought Nirupa, was very nearly like being _in love_ with Mary, but without all the complications.

But looking at Violet now, Nirupa felt a pang, a nostalgic twinge for those days when things were complicated, unrequited, so raw and exquisite and hopeless and hopeful, and she felt so very glad that their Violet, their little girl, had come through that to this. To being in _requited_ love _._

And Nirupa didn’t give a damn who his daddies were. If Sherrinford Holmes ever dared to make their Violet cry, he would not know what had hit him.

 But Nirupa kept that thought strictly to herself.

 


	25. Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One phone call, and eight hours later, a new Holmes and Watson share their first real kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from the song by Tom Jones and the Art of Noise

Eight hours after Violet phoned Ford to tell him she loved him (and apologise for having taken so long to realise it) Ford stepped off the plane at a little airfield in Ghana.

Violet was waiting impatiently for him, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet and scouring the small airport building for the first sign of her friend ( _best friend, the best, most wonderful, adorable, brilliant, amazing, sweet, marvellous, he’s my boyfriend now, is he? Can I say that yet? Can I… **oh there he is**!!_ )

Violet broke away from Mary and Nirupa to run to him, and Ford stood there, grinning like an idiot and rooted to the spot, a statue made of joy and disbelief, as though if he moved it would break the spell and everything would have been a strange and unbearable mistake.

She came to an abrupt halt, a handspan away from Ford, and then they just stood there. Looking at each other.

“Ford. Hi.”

“Hello, Violet.”

Ford and Violet stood for a long time, close enough to touch but not touching. Grinning fit to split in two. Breathing each other’s exhilarated breaths that filled the space between them. Just that, for a good minute or two.

Eventually, Violet leaned ever so slightly forward and said: “I’m going to kiss you now, if that’s okay.”

“That’s okay,” said Ford, his smile becoming even more dazzling, “That’s better than okay.”

And Violet leaned a little further, closing the distance between them, and pressed her lips to his.

Ford made a tiny sound, part sigh, part high-pitched moan, though it was way too short to be a moan, really. A little sound of relief and need, an involuntary squeak of the final, _at last_ , release of tension.

Violet’s body swayed into his, like he was made of steel and she was a magnet, or maybe the other way around, and her torso was crushed against his. One of her arms was wound around his back, and her other reached up so her hand was buried in his curly dark hair, her thumb brushing tenderly against his ear.

Her lips were warm and soft on his; sweet and strong. Ford moved slightly, finding a better angle, and when her lips parted, her mouth seeking to be closer, he responded in kind. Their first kiss. Not quite chaste, not quite erotic, but full of so much promise.

For his part, both of Ford’s arms were wrapped around her, one low over the small of her back, one high between her shoulders, and his grip was firm, but not too tight. Not holding her like a prisoner, but more like she was something precious and he didn’t want to break her or trap her, but just to feel the solidness of her presence, like she might melt away at any moment, and he was prepared for that, he was, but _oh_ , he didn’t want her to go.

Mary and Nirupa looked away at first, then looked back, then began quietly discussing the merits of holding up score cards out of ten or openly quoting sections of The Princess Bride relating to pure and perfect kisses. In the end, they actually had to clear their throats and point out that, beautiful as the scene was, they were holding up traffic in the little airport building and maybe they should all leave now.

Violet thought it was adorable when Ford blushed, and kissed him again, and he almost withdrew from the kiss in embarrassment, but obviously couldn’t make himself stop either, so he kissed her back for another half a minute. Nirupa cleared her throat pointedly, and he finally pulled away, grinning and blushing and so, so, so happy. Violet giggled and nuzzled against his throat for a second, until Mary laughed at them, and they both decided hurriedly that yes, it was time to move.

After that, the young lovers discovered how difficult it is to greet members of one’s extended family, pick up one’s luggage, get a trolley, and climb into a jeep all while hanging on to and apparently physically unable to let go of the adored one’s hand.

But they managed.

 


	26. Breathe Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Violet Morstan Watson finds her love epiphany in Ghana while talking to Nirupa, Sherrinford Holmes is at home in London, preparing to accept that his love will forever be unrequited. Mycroft considers doing something unforgivable to spare his son, but Ford says he's fine. It's all fine. As long as Violet is somewhere on Earth, they are breathing the same air, and that's enough.
> 
> Then Ford gets a phone call that changes his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Sia's 'Breathe Me'.

Mycroft Holmes, habitually a late worker and minimal sleeper, wasn't surprised to find his son's study light still on at 3am. Sherrinford had inherited the family trait of needing little sleep and being too intellectually restless to find sleep easily in any case.

Mycroft knocked on the door before opening it to see Sherrinford at his desk, books and papers spread over the oak surface, notes and equations scrawled in every margin. Chemistry texts tonight, by the look of it, some in Russian or Arabic, both of which Sherrinford read fluently. (He knew six languages fluently, another three sufficiently for conversation. His studies in that area had been helped significantly through practice with Nirupa D'Souza, as well as with Mycroft and Sherlock themselves. )

"Studies going well?" Mycroft asked.

Sherrinford smiled at his father. "The Russians have done some interesting work in biochemistry that hasn't been translated yet." Mycroft nodded, knowing that some of their work had gone even further than Sherrinford was allowed to know.

Mycroft paused before deciding to ask the question he had asked almost every year since Sherrinford had begun university studies at the age of 16. “Have you decided on a field in which to specialise?”

Sherrinford shrugged. “Being a generalist still looks more interesting, although there are some projects coming up on the Mars colony that offer some possibilities.”

Mycroft suppressed a sigh. He wasn’t disappointed, not really. But he _worried_. His son the genius already had a string of degrees: Chemistry, Histology and Anatomy, Computer Science, Plant Science, and Mathematics and Statistics. In between all of these science courses, Sherrinford had taken classes in law, literature, theatre studies and Modern Art, just for _fun_. Now, at 23, the boy had moved on Bioinformatics, Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry. Mycroft realised that Sherrinford needed to study two or three majors at a time to avoid academic boredom. Both of his fathers had been just the same.

Still, at some point, the boy would have to choose a future. He couldn’t be a dilettante student forever. Like his biological father. Mycroft grit his teeth on that train of thought. It was bad enough coping with the uncertain and dangerous life Sherlock had chosen for himself. It had been bad enough that Sally had been a field agent for so long, and Mycroft hadn’t realised what a relief it would be when she retired to operations. Mycroft wasn’t sure he could bear the strain of his boy choosing such a hazardous path.

Still. Work on the Mars colony. Such a young endeavour, full of risks certainly, but also certainly offering significant scope across numerous fields which would keep Sherrinford fully occupied.

Of course, there was that other motivation.

“Violet is transferring to the Mars colony for her internship in the middle of the year.”

“Yes, but that’s not why I’m considering it.”

“Sherrinford…”

“It’s all right Dad. I know she doesn’t… I know.” Ford put his pen down and turned to his father. “I don’t mind. Not really. She’s not obliged to feel the same way about me.”

This. The unconditional and wholehearted love he held for Violet: that was an open secret between Sherrinford and his father. He never could hide anything from his Dad anyway. Ford suspected that Sherlock knew, too, but Sherlock never spoke of it. Ford was grateful for that.

“I know, Sherrinford, but is it wise to dog her footsteps so?”

“Is it logical to avoid what is possibly the greatest career opportunity for my particular set of skills just because Violet will be there?”

Mycroft sighed. He hated it when Sherrinford employed logic in this talks, because he couldn’t gainsay it.

“She’s my best friend, Dad. It doesn’t matter that we don’t love each other in exactly the same way. If I stick it out, maybe it’ll change.”

“She may never…”

“I mean, I might change. We could be like Sherlock and John, or Nirupa and Mary. That’s no bad thing.”

“It’s less than you want.”

“And it’s more than most people have.”

True. Yet Mycroft would wish for more happiness than an unrequited love for his son. Perhaps one day he would meet someone else. Perhaps.

And _damn,_ but his son was a Holmes, and a reader of people, even his fathers who both defied reading by others so often.

“You forget the family I come from,” said Ford, with a small smile, “Mostly we fall late and we fall for life, romantic or platonic. You and Mum, Sherlock and John. I just started younger.  I don’t mind. I mean. I’d like… but it doesn’t have to be that. Violet’s in my life, no matter what, for the rest of my life. Worse things can happen.”

Mycroft could only  hope that Sherrinford would be able to maintain that equilibrium as the years wore on, and Violet continued to meet and date other men, until one day she chose one of them for marriage, children. What role would Sherrinford have then? What heartache awaited him?

Not for the first time, Mycroft reflected that being a father was _hard_. If he could spare his boy any harm, physical or emotional, he would. Yet time and again, he had been unable to do so, for reasons both practical and emotional. The worst tragedies had been avoided, but for how long?

 

Mycroft stamped down the impulse to arrange for Violet to be rejected for her internship on Mars, leaving Sherrinford a clear field to apply for the Martian project.  The controlling approach had proven worse than useless with Sherlock, after all, and was not likely to work on Sherrinford either. No, Mycroft thought, he wouldn’t make the same mistakes with Sherrinford, no matter the temptation. Besides, Mycroft was almost surprised to realise, he couldn’t do that to Violet, for her own sake, and not only because Sherrinford would never forgive him if he found out.

Mycroft grimaced. Fatherhood and age had made him soft. He should probably go and threaten a dictatorial foreign potentate somewhere just to get some balance.

Dropping the subject, Mycroft ran his hand over Sherrinford’s cropped, dark hair and kissed the top of his head. “All right, then,” he said, “But Sherrinford, do talk to your mother or me if you need to. At any time.”

Sherrinford smiled at his father. “I know. Good night.”

Sherrinford was up another hour before he gave up on studies that trickled slowly, winding as they must at all times around the thought of Violet. She was away visiting her mothers in Ghana now. He wouldn’t see her again until her return for the last semester and then graduation. Unless something went terribly wrong, she’d be off to Mars after that.

The thought of Violet not breathing the same air as him made his heart hurt, even though he knew there was no logic in the thought. On Mars, air was made by chemical processes, and only seeds of it came from Earth. It was not the same air at all.

Even now, so far away, the air they breathed had swirled round the Earth for millennia. Statistically, the breaths they took had once shared proximity, even if they didn’t now. They both breathed the air that the Caesars once breathed. They breathed the air that Albert Einstein and Marie Curie once breathed. And so they breathed the same air. It was comforting, thinking that. His inhale, her exhale, shared with kings and scientists and philosophers, and it was all right, wherever she was, because _they were breathing the same air_.

Ford clenched his fists until his nails dug into his palms, interrupting his brain, bringing calmness back into his racing thoughts, put his books and papers away and went to bed.

At a few minutes past five a.m., his mobile phone rang. He scrambled for it. Calls at this time of the day had, historically, been harbingers of excitement, not always of the good kind.

“Sherrinford Holmes,” he said, voice croaky from lack of sleep, but otherwise alert.

“Ford. It’s Violet.”

“Violet!” Ford sat bolt upright in bed.

 “Stay calm,” she said, “It’s not really an emergency.”

“It’s five in the morning,” he said, a little incredulously, his tone clearly stating _if it’s not an emergency why are you calling?_

“I know what time it is, Ford,” Violet said impatiently, “I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important.”

“Is anybody hurt?”

“No, nobody’s hurt. Everyone’s fine. I just wanted to tell you I love you.”

“You love me.” Ford knew he sounded dense, but he was sleep fuddled, and nothing made any sense.

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well. I love you too, Violet.” His heart tripped, but he kept his tone even. He and Violet used to say this sort of thing to each other all the time. She meant a sisterly kind of love, he knew. That was okay. If it was all she felt, then that was okay. Really it was.

“No,” said Violet, her voice low and definite, almost thrumming with meaning, “I mean _in love with you_ kind of love you.”

The whole sense of everything not computing got stronger and much more surreal. Ford breathed in. He breathed out. He breathed in.

“You are in love with me,” he said, sounding shell shocked. Holmeses on the whole hated repeating the obvious and refused to do it most of the time, but this… this was not obvious. This needed clarification. When Violet didn’t contradict him, Ford said it again. “You love me in the in-love sense. Romantic love. Not platonic love. You, Violet Morstan Watson, are romantically in love with me, Sherrinford Holmes. You… you want to hold my hand and kiss me and and and and…” his brain raced far, far ahead of his tongue and he fisted his free hand in his short hair, pulled on it until it hurt to stop the mad flow of thought. “You love me. Really?”

He could almost hear the happy laughter in her. Something breathless in her voice. He could picture her smile, the way her eyes shone when she was giddy with delight. He loved that look.

“Yes, really. Absolutely,” she was saying, and the words were just sounds, but sounds like the way rainbows sounded, and birds sounded, and the way London sounded, a rush and roar of life and brilliance, “I adore you. I want to kiss the living breath out of you.”

Oh, oh, oh, oh this was too good to be true, but it was true, and so therefore life was too good and too perfect and Ford thought his chest would split open, and his forehead, so that all the sound her words made inside his heart could spill out and paint the world in the most perfect palette.

“I love you, Violet. I love you. I love you.” Each syllable a brush stroke, “I’ll fly out to Ghana today. I have to see you. I have to see you now. It might take a few hours to arrange. But I’m coming to see you.”

Violet’s infectious, joyful laughter rang down the phone into his brain, taking up a permanent position in his left prefrontal cortex. “Seriously? Well, I suppose you can at that. Text me with your arrival time and we’ll come and get you.”

“I have to hang up now, Violet. I have to arrange the flight.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to hang up. I want to hear your voice forever. Because I love you. And you love me.”

“Yes! Yes yes yes yes! I love you.”

After they hung up, he could still hear her happy laughter, recalled perfectly from the place he had stored the sound in the seat of positive emotion.

A moment later, Sherrinford was at the door to his parents’ room, in his pyjamas, looking at his father as Mycroft snapped to wakefulness.

“She loves me. I need to fly to Ghana.”

“It’s…” Mycroft peered at the clock as Sally muttered to wakefulness, “Half past five in the morning.”

“You said at any time,” said Sherrinford, and his boy’s smile was, Mycroft thought, one of the most heart-stoppingly beautiful things he’d ever seen.

**

Eight hours later, Sherrinford Holmes stepped out of a plane in a tiny airfield in Ghana, where he kissed Violet Morstan Watson like a lover instead of a brother for the very first time.

Like millions of couples before (and after) them, Ford and Violet put up with a certain amount of good natured ribbing from the spectators to their helpless tendency to touch and kiss and hold hands and just gaze at each other in fond disbelief. That these spectators were Violet’s mothers would have been more off-putting, but Ford had grown up with them, too, and they seemed very far from disapproving. Mary and Nirupa were mostly prone to indulgent grinning and teasing comments, most of which they missed entirely. All of their senses were filled up to overflowing with each other, after all.

Ford couldn’t have really told you how they spent the day. They talked. They laughed. They held hands and kissed and laughed some more. They talked about university and Mars and things they’d done as children and shock blankets and the underwear garden they’d once made. For long stretches they didn’t talk at all, but sat leaning against each other.

Night fell. Mary and Nirupa both retired, after saying good night, then grinning at each other when they had to say it three times before either Ford or Violet noticed.

Ford leaned against the door jamb. Violet leaned against him. His long, brown arms were wrapped around her shoulders and down her arms, his hands folded over hers in her lap. His nose was buried in Violet’s dark hair. He liked the smell of her hair. Today it smelled of shampoo and dust and sunshine and cardamom and, for some reason, peaches.

“Sherry…”

Ford froze in the act of nuzzling her ear. He breathed softly against her skin.

 “You haven’t called me that in years,” he said.

Violet arched her neck, exposing the gold-tanned length of it to his kisses. “I overheard you say you didn’t like it, a few years ago. You were talking to the Lestrade twins about some kids at school, I think. Sorry, I won’t…”

“I always liked it when you said it,” he said, obliging her neck with a kiss, then another, “I was sorry you stopped. I just didn’t like it from the kids at school. They made it sound… mean. You always made it sound special.”

For all his intelligence, sometimes Ford found it hard to articulate the differences he heard in the way people spoke to him. Violet had always said ‘Sherry’ like it was a secret password between them. The hush of the ‘shhh’, a slight roll on the ‘r’, the short ‘e’ at the end. When Ford had learned French he realised that when Violet called him Sherry, it sounded like _ch_ _éri_ , and he’d learned why he loved the sound of it in her mouth.  Other people said it like a slur, a nasal whine, a disparaging curse. Only Violet ever said it like it meant ‘sweetheart’, even when it had only meant ‘friend’.

“Sherry,” murmured Violet, and it sounded once more like _ch_ _éri_ as she twisted up to kiss his throat, his cheek, his nose, his mouth.

Their tongues met too, and explored the taste and shape of one another’s names and sighs, traced the heat of desire on skin. They breathed the same – _the very same_ – air.

Then Violet took her Sherry by the hand and led him inside.


	27. There’s Got to Be A Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Violet Morstan Watson and Sherrinford Holmes are in love and have spent their first night together. In Mary and Nirupa's house.
> 
> How will all the parents react? And who gets to give 'if you hurt my kid you'll be sorry' speech?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Maureen McGovern's song of the same name.

When, in the morning, Mary found the guest room had not been slept in, and that behind her daughter’s door she could hear giggles and sighs, she got a little teary. Nirupa laughed at her a little, but she was teary too, Mary could see.

John, when Mary video-phoned him, already knew that Ford had flown out to see his daughter. He and Sherlock were not teary. Actually, John looked like he didn’t know if he was supposed to look delighted or should be on the next flight over to give the ‘if-you-break-my-daughter’s-heart’ speech. Sherlock just looked smug, as though he’d known all along that this would happen. Which, very possibly, he had.

“She’s happy?” John kept asking. “They’re happy?”

“Disgustingly happy,” Nirupa supplied over Mary, who was laughing at her man, “Truly, it’s nauseating how happy they are. I’d tell them how nauseating they’re being, only as far as I can tell they have no idea that anybody else exists.”

John nodded, and he and Mary exchanged a nostalgic, wicked grin. He pressed his fingers to the screen – on his side of the connection, his fingertips would be pressed to the image of Mary’s mouth. She pressed her fingers against the pixels of his fingertips.

“Miss you, babe,” said Mary.

“I miss you too, beautiful,” said John.

“Hey, Dad!”

Mary drew aside in surprise to allow her daughter – clad in a sheet and a huge smile and carrying a bowl of fruit she’d just liberated from the kitchen – to wave at her father.

John stared at her, eyes huge, and then decided to pretend he could not see that his daughter had extravagant bed hair and a hickey the size and rough shape of Poland just below her left clavicle.

“Hey, baby girl, how’s my nearly-doctor?”

“Happier than Sherlock with a juicy triple murder in a locked room on a submarine under an ice floe.”

That made John laugh, and Sherlock leaned over his shoulder to inspect her face.

“I trust Ford is the same.” It was surprising to hear it said in the tone normally reserved for the ‘if-you-break-my-son’s-heart’ speech.

Violet got to her knees so she could get closer to the camera. She pushed her face up close and said, solemnly and passionately: “Yes, Sherlock, he is. He’s the most patient and the best of men, and he’s happy, and I’m happy, and we’re going to make each other _stupidly_ happy until the end of time. I’m a bit slow off the mark sometimes, but I got there, and I’m never making him anything but happy ever again, if I can possibly help it.”

In the background, they heard Sherlock’s phone ping with a message. He told John to fetch his phone. John told him he was a lazy git and to get his own phone. Sherlock said he was busy talking to Violet. John told Sherlock that he, John, was talking to Violet, and that Sherlock could get his own damned phone. Sherlock settled himself firmly in front of the camera and ignored John’s attempts to dislodge him again.

John fetched the phone, but instead of giving it to Sherlock, he laughed and composed a message in reply. Sherlock gave him a dirty look. John’s face answered with a raised eyebrow and a quirk of a smile.

Mary forbore to point out that for men in their 60s, they behaved a lot like teenagers.

Violet, on the other hand, rolled her eyes and said: “Idiots.”

Sherlock’s phone pinged again.

“Give me my phone, John.”

“No,” said John, texting another reply.

“John.”

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock managed to grab it and peered at the screen. Then he grinned and held the screen up to the camera, so that everyone could read it.

_I’m always happy when I’m near Violet. – FH_

_It’s true. You *do* sound nauseatingly in love. – JW_

_Hello John. I am. Tell Sherlock not to worry. She is my heart. How could my heart ever make me sad? – FH_

_Take good care of hers as well, then. – JW_

The phone pinged again as they looked at the screen.

 _I will as soon as you stop showing my messages to everyone, Sherlock._ _– FH_

Violet giggled, jumped to her feet and, with the breakfast supplies, ran back to her bedroom. The door slammed on the sounds of kissing and laughter.

Mary, John, Nirupa and Sherlock stared at each other over the screen and the distance.

“Well,” said Mary, “I suspect that’s the last we’ll be seeing of them today. I’m going shopping. For several hours. Possibly several days. Will you join me, Rupe?”

“Good god, yes.”

They disconnected the call.

Across the sea, in Baker Street, John and Sherlock stared at the blank video screen, then at each other.

“Well,” said John.

“It’s about time,” said Sherlock.

“Hmm,” John agreed.

“They’re well matched.”

“They are.”

“Then what’s wrong, John?”

“Nothing.”

“John.”

“It’s nothing. It’s…” John clenched his jaw, then sighed, then he looked at Sherlock and Sherlock saw that John, who he’d last seen cry the day Violet was born, had strangely bright eyes. “Our little girl is all grown up,” he said at last, “She’s in madly love with someone who loves her madly back. And he’s her best friend. And Ford is insanely happy, and I’m a stupid, sentimental old man.”

“Oh, that,” said Sherlock, smiling as he leaned over to press his forehead against John’s. “Well, I think we can be stupid, sentimental old men for a little while, under the circumstances.”

“Good,” said John, and he had a little cry while Sherlock patted his back. And then made tea and pretended they were absolutely _not_ a pair of maudlin dads very pleased with how their kids’ lives were turning out.


End file.
